Genre Analysis: What Earthquakes can Teach us About Elections

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I listened to a story entitled, "What Earthquakes can Teach us About Elections". This title grabbed my attention because the two topics were things I would have never associated with each other. I feel as though every title should have something to draw focus to that story rather than the ones it is posted next to, and I think this story did a very good job at that.  Timing is also important because if there is a trend in what people want to see, it will be more likely that that story will be viewed opposed to others. This story also came out at a popular time considering the elections were being held that week.

This story began by introducing the topic briefly, so they didn’t lose listeners due to boredom, and they put in another attention grabber: “A blogger for The New York Times was fiercely criticized during the campaign for forecasting overwhelming odds of President Obama’s reelection.” Instantly the listeners want to know the facts that this man has to back up his bold statement.  This story then goes on to talk about how people can and have been predicting election turn outs without even looking at statistics. A man then comes on and mentions that he spoke with one of the self proclaimed experts. The next part was a really good idea in my opinion. The way it was formatted was so he could play an older conversation about the topic without having that person live and in the studio. He introduced it by saying that he had a conversation with the man last week and that he wanted to play part of the conversation. It flowed well, and made perfect sense as to why they were using it.

The following part of the story is where the earthquake aspect of the title comes into play and where everything begins to connect. Yet another person is brought up in this conversation. This time it is a geophysicist that happened to be explaining the science behind earthquakes. He said to think of politics in terms of earthquakes rather than conservative versus liberal. Again, this leaves the listener wondering what the speaker means. Eventually, the point they wanted to get across was that elections could be determined by stability versus upheaval. If there is no scandal or big event that happens, the country remains with its stability, therefore keeping the president the same.

Something I was surprised this story did not have that many others did was the intro/outro music. I think it gives a more polished and professional feel when done correctly.  They also used two people as the focus of the interview, but brought in clips of other conversations to tie into the story. That was the part I liked the best considering I would not have thought to do it on my own. 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/11/09/164711093/what-earthquakes-can-teach-us-about-elections

For my story I was planning on talking about students in Barrett. They get the better food, separate gym, bigger bathrooms, etc, and they also get a lot of fun poked at them for living there. I think it would be interesting to see their take on things opposed to someone who lives in another residence hall.