Final Exam: Current Events Portion

1. The conflict in this story is that the Labays, the family that owns and runs Nau's Enfield Drug, wants to demolish an old house that they own and sell the lot. The Old West Austin Neighborhood Association is fighting against this because they believe that the house has historic value. I think the Labays should be allowed to demolish the house because they need the money, the house has become a nuisance to them, and as long as it's indisrepair and uninhabitable I don't really think the house has any value. The compromise proposed has been to subdivide the lot to preserve the house but allow development on the other portion. I think this is a good compromise because it protects the interests of both parties.

2. UT and A&M have entered the bid together to operate a nuclear weapons lab. The two universities would "provide research expertise, workforce training and independent peer review of the work done at Sandia." I think this would be a great opportunity for UT and A&M and that universities should be allowed to do this sort of thing because it greatly expands the research and learning opportunities for their professors and students.

3. The latest news in the Bill Cosby sexual assault saga is that Cosby will stand trial for at least one of many accusations, as ruled by Judge Elizabeth A. McHugh. I strongly agree with the judge's decision because, it seems to me, no forward motion has been made in any of the accusations against Cosby and it's about time. Cosby's lawyers argued against this ruling. saying that the former district attorney promised to never prosecute Cosby if his testified in another civil suit. I don't think that arguments has any merit because it seems to me like that's kind of obstructing justice and has no legal standing. I think this story deserved to be on the front page because it's a very high profile case that a lot of people have been following for a long time and have a great deal of interest in.

4. The School Board voted on Monday night to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary to Russell Lee Elementary. Russell Lee was a Depression-era photographer, lived in the area, and founded UT's photography department. The name was chosen to replace the problematic "Robert E." but still allow people to refer to the school as "Lee." Some people wanted rename the school Bettie Mann Elementary after the campus's first African-American teacher. In a compromise, the kindergarten wing of Lee has been named in her honor. It was kind of awkward because some people felt that keeping Lee wasn't really doing anything to change the nature of the name. I honestly feel pretty neutral about the whole thing. I did think that we should rename the school and I'm glad that it happened but at the same time I didn't go to Lee so I don't place that much value on calling the school "Lee." To be honest, they probably could've renamed the school anything and I would've went with it.

5. A predicted oucome of the Baylor sexual assault scandal is that the university's president, Ken Starr, will be terminated. Pepper Hamilton Law Firm has compiled a report about the sexual assault allegations against multiple Baylor football players and how the school had failed to competently handle the situations. Now I don't think I have enough information to have a clear opinion on the matter but I do think that whomever was responsible for the failure to protect those women should be held accountable and should be punished accordingly.

Grace London Feature Edited

Junior Grace Schmidhauser is working hard as the year draws to a close. Finals are approaching, she just was inducted into the National Honors Society, and she’s working on her upcoming album. Wait, an album? Yes, an album (her third, in fact) because Grace isn’t just your typical McCallum student. She’s also a local musician that goes by the name “Grace London.”

It all started with The Wizard of Oz. Grace credits her preschool obsession with the movie and its songs as her first experience with music and the first sign of an inclination towards the art form. She started classical guitar lessons at 7 years old and by the time she was 9, it was clear Grace wanted to sing and perform. Replacing “Schmidhauser” with “London” (because it’s more memorable and easier to say), a young Grace started out by playing small coffeeshop shows. By middle school, after a brief stint playing with the pop punk band Residual Kid and auditioning for America’s Got Talent, she was a fully fledged songwriter and established musician in the Austin scene. However, Grace thinks that her young age definitely had a certain degree of influence on her early success.

           “When you’re a 9-year-old girl, people are going to be really nice to you either way,” she explained. “People think you’re kind of cute, and it’s kind of a novelty.”

           Novelty act or not, Grace was certainly talented and has worked to make the difficult transition to becoming a performer who will be taken seriously. Refraining from performing as much during her freshman year, Grace focused on refining her writing skills and working on developing her music to new levels of maturity. She also chose not to capitalize on her age anymore, something she could have easily done as a 14-year-old girl. Grace also had to get used to being treated as an older performer, not a child who got compliments thrown at her every time she took the stage, competing for attention against other adult musicians, trying to be taken seriously, and not being seen as “just good for her age.”

           “I was kind of used to people constantly praising me and being really nice,” Grace admitted.

           Grace, only 16 and has already been writing and performing for seven years, has only one year of high school left. Although there is that certain amount of uncertainty that’s present in all upcoming seniors’ lives, Grace knows for sure that she will continue to write music and pursue a career in the music industry, though perhaps not exclusively in performing.

           “There’s so many jobs in the music industry, and I don’t want to limit myself to just performing aspects of it,” she said. “Songwriting for other people is something I’d be really interested in.”

It was a New York University summer music program that she went to last year that made Grace aware of the many options that she had as a musician. Having a steady job—whether songwriting, producing, or music journalism—she realized, allows her to continue to perform and make music without having to compromise any of its artistic integrity to make money. Now she plans to go to college not just for music, but also for business, songwriting, and production, or perhaps get an internship somewhere where she can learn the skills necessary to be successful in the music business and make connections in the industry. While she is interested in other aspects of the music business, Grace still plans to write music and perform after high school.

            “I definitely want to continue to pursue a career in performing but I don’t want to limit myself,” she said.

When asked if she thought she was a successful musician at the present moment, Grace stuttered. Of course, relative to other 16-year-olds, she is. She has a booking agent and a website, a Spotify page and an album review in The Austin Chronicle. If you hold her career to the definition of success that many people have—fame, money, playing sold out arenas every night—she hasn’t even made a dent. Grace, however, says that that’s no longer her definition of success. It was when she was younger but not anymore.

“I don’t know, I’ve accomplished a lot of things that I’ve wanted to by this point in my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t call myself a successful musician but I think that I’ve been successful in trying to grow in my music and working really hard on it and making sure that I’m setting myself up to pursue that later on in my life.”

Check out Grace’s music of iTunes, Bandcamp, Spotify, and gracelondon.com

Extra-Credit Photograph Assignment

A mother comforts her son after his father attacked her and then wielded the knife at deputies who shot and killed the man.

This is my favorite picture I saw in this archive. The personal moment between the mother and son is very emotionally overwhelming. I also find the strength seen in the mother's face incredibly interesting. She's the one who was attacked and yet she is comforting, not the one being comforted. I think it's a display of a mother's strength and resolve when it comes to her child.


The Ring-O-Fire gives riders a different view of the Florida Citrus Festival.

I think that the angle of this photograph is very clever. The caption talks about how riders get a different view of the festival while we, the audience, get a not often seen perspective of the ride. Also, the color composition of this photograph is very well done. Orange and blue are contrasting colors, making the photo look more balanced and dynamic.


William Mills celebrates after the Razorbacks knocked off the heavily favored SMU Mustangs.

Capturing Mills in the middle of celebration and making him the sole subject of the photograph gives the audience a sense that they're sharing a very personal, joy-filled moment with him.


WHO”S WATCHING, a sexual predator lives within one mile of most homes in the state of Florida.

I think this illustration/photograph is very haunting and unsettling, illustrating the presence of sexual predators in a child's life. It captured the subject matter.


Tom Stephens holds a gun to the head of his wife, at an Arlington, Tx 7-11, after being served with divorce papers. The siege ended with one clerk dead another shot and Stephens committing suicide.

This image is incredibly disturbing which is why I think it's so good. Sackett dares to throw this not often seen image of domestic violence directly in your face, no fancy angles or distortion. It's straightforward and the audience has no choice but to look at it.


Deputies restrain David Letterman’s stalker Margaret Mary Ray as she becomes belligerent and aggressive during her competency hearing.

The moment this image was captured is very important. It's in this moment that the picture tells a story, the woman's sanity (or lack thereof), her distress, and even the power of celebrity. It certainly makes me uncomfortable looking at it but I think that that was Sackett's purpose.


A couple stand with their infant in the door of a van they call home in a Houston encampment known as Reaganville.

This is another case where Sackett intentionally simplifies the photograph (this time adding in black and white, nothing is more straightforward than black and white) to make a statement. He doesn't approach the subject in a roundabout way, by making the photograph straightforward, he makes the audience look at it and face the realities of modern poverty head on.


Abdelelmajid Aassal takes a cigarette break at his Kissimmee, Florida home that took a direct hit from a tornado.

The combination of chaos and calm, the ruined house and a smoke break, offers interesting contrast to the photograph.


A priest searches for the dead to administer the last rites after Delta Flight 191 crashed in Dallas while emergency personnel follow and remove the bodies.

The distance this photo was taken from is interesting because it depersonalizes it. We don't have to look at any dead bodies, we can barely even tell that's a priest.


A sand hill crane checks the surroundings.

I like this picture because it reminds me of those Japanese prints of herons and cranes. It calls to mind culture, serenity, and refinement.

Current Events Quiz 6.1

Mr. Winter, I have no idea why this was never posted. My apologizes.

1. If Jack Lew's proposal is acted on, Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the 20 dollar bill and other women and civil rights activists will be added to the $5 and $10. Originally planning to put a woman on the $10 (replacing former secretary of the treasury and founding father Alexander Hamilton), the decision to switch to the $20 may have something to do with the immensely popular rap musical about Hamilton, Hamilton. This proves that the arts and popular culture do have some degree of influence over government.

2. Three government employees have been charged with covering up evidence of lead contamination in Flint, Michigan. This has been called a "rare" development because the people at fault were only neglectful, not corrupt. The three things the Flint government did that caused this disaster were not replacing the old lead pipes that contaminated the water, switching their water source in order to save money (the new water ended up being corrosive to the pipes), and not addressing the issue soon enough. Flint's governor has pledged to drink filtered Flint tap water in order to show that it is safe. This will probably encourage residents to feel safe and use the filtered water.

3. The Clinton and Trump campaigns are both "invigorated" because of their big wins in the New York primaries. As of April 21st, Trump had 845 delegates out of the 1,237 needed to be nominated and Clinton had 1,930 out of 2,383. Next Tuesday, the primaries for Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island are happening. In Indianapolis, Trump protested the Republican nominating system. Clinton's win in New York upset Bernie Sanders's winning streak.

4. The Texas State Teachers Association (TSTA) is suing the Texas Education Agency because of a new evaluation system that tied teachers' scores to standardized test scores. The TSTA says the new system is complicated, does not tell teachers how exactly to improve, and does not even accurately reflect a teacher's performance. They say, because of this, that it's unfair and violates state law. The article mentions AISD as adopting their own scoring system which limits the use of standardized test scores. Test scores will account to 10% of the teacher's rating as opposed to the 20% in the Texas Education Agency's system. A value-added model rates a teacher's success by examining the test scores of an individual student over time. This is exactly what the TSTA is protesting, saying that a student's progress relies very little on a teacher's performance. 

5. Volkswagen has made a deal to pay back U.S. customers who own diesel-fueled cars that cheat on emissions tests. The money involved is about $1 billion dollars and some might receive more money than others depending on the make and model of their car. Last September it was found that some Volkswagen cars had cheated during laboratory emissions tests and were actually polluting while on the road. Volkswagen will probably have to pay much more than $1 billion, as they face a charge of as much as $20 billion dollars for violating the Clean Air Act.

6. Surfing dog catches waves in Port Aransas: Gerilyn and Jason Hibbler of Port Aransas have taught their Belgian malinois, Halo, to surf and now thier doing the same for shelter dogs in the area. By doing this, they bring business to Animal Shelter, as the images of the surfing dogs are shared on social media and garner attention of potential dog owners. Teaching the dogs to surf has also helped the couple cope with the loss of their daughter who died in a drunk driving accident in 2013. 
I chose this story initially because the title caught my attention. It was unusual and made me want to read more. I don't think it was exactly newsworthy or important but it definitely used novelty to it's advantage and was a lighthearted and touching read.

Grace London: McCallum's Own Hannah Montana

According to McCallum junior and musician Grace London (more commonly known by her legal name, Grace Schmidhauser), it all started with The Wizard of Oz. She credits her preschool obsession with the movie and it’s songs as her first experience with music and the first sign of an inclination towards the art form. 

            She started classical guitar lessons at seven years old and by the time she was nine, it was clear Grace wanted to sing and perform. Replacing “Schmidhauser” with “London” (because it’s more memorable and easier to say), a young Grace started out by playing small coffee shop shows. By middle school, after a brief stint playing with the pop punk band Residual Kid and auditioning for America’s Got Talent, she was a fully fledged songwriter and established musician in the Austin scene. However, Grace thinks that her young age definitely had a certain degree of influence on her early success.

            “When you’re a nine year old girl, people are going to be really nice to you either way,” she explained. “People think you’re kind of cute and it’s kind of a novelty.”

            Novelty act or not, Grace was certainly talented and has worked to make the difficult transition to becoming a performer who will be taken seriously. Taking a year off from performing during her freshman year, Grace refined her writing skills and worked on developing her music to new levels of maturity. She also chose not to capitalize on her age anymore at this point, something she could have easily done as thirteen and fourteen year old girl. Grace also had to get used to being treated as an older performer, not a child who got compliments thrown at her every time she took the stage, competing for attention against other adult musicians, trying to be taken seriously, and not being seen as “just good for her age.”

            “I was kind of used to people constantly praising me and being really nice,” Grace admitted.

            Grace, only sixteen and already with a seven year long and counting musical career, has only one year of high school left. Although there is that certain amount of uncertainty that’s present in all upcoming seniors’ lives, Grace knows for sure that she will continue to write music and pursue a career in the music industry, though perhaps not exclusively in performing.

            “There’s so many jobs in the music industry and I don’t want to limit myself to just performing aspects of it,” she said. “Songwriting for other people is something I’d be really interested in.”

It was a New York University summer music program that she went to last year that made Grace aware of the many options that she had as a musician. At the program Having a steady job-whether songwriting, producing, or music journalism, she realized, allows her to continue to perform and make music without having to compromise any of its artistic integrity to make money. Now she plans to go to college not just for music, but also for business, songwriting, and production, or perhaps get an internship somewhere where she can learn the skills necessary to be successful in the music business and make connections in the industry. While she is interested in other aspects of the music business, Grace still plans to write music and perform after high school.

             “I definitely want to continue to pursue a career in performing but I don’t want to limit myself,” she said.

When asked if she thought she was a successful musician at the present moment, Grace stuttered. Of course, relative to other sixteen-year-olds, she is. She has a booking agent and a website, a Spotify page and an album review in the Austin Chronicle. However, if you hold her to the definition of success that many people have-fame, money, playing sold out arenas every night-she hasn’t even made a dent. However, Grace says that that’s not her definition of success, it was what she wanted when she was younger but not anymore.

“I don’t know, I’ve accomplished a lot of things that I’ve wanted to by this point in my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t call myself a successful musician but I think that I’ve been successful in trying to grow in my music and working really hard on it and making sure that I’m setting myself up to pursue that later on in my life.”

Check out Grace’s music of iTunes, Bandcamp, Spotify, and gracelondon.com

Newspaper Layout Vocabulary

Flag: text that states the name of the newspaper in large, bold letters across the front page; includes the volume and issue numbers, publication date, and city and state where the paper is published

Folio: page number

Byline: text that identifies the writer of a story

Jump: text that identifies where a story is continued

Story Dividers: those lines between different stories so that you can separate them from each other 

Screen: shaded area

Infographic: a graphic that provides facts or information like a chart or graph, not a photograph

Masthead/ staff box: the names of the publisher, editor, and other important people

Bastard measure: the one thing on a page that's different to create variety

Raw Wrap: text that extends into a column along the headline

Reefer: text or a graphic that refers to a story elsewhere in the paper

Wild Art: a photo that doesn't accompany any story

Pull Quote: a graphic treatment of a quote pulled from the story

Ears: the white space on either side of the flag

Banner: a wide headline extending across the entire page

Kicker Headline: a small, short, one-line headline

Wicket Headline: a headline that consists of two or more lines of a secondary headline above one or more lines of a primary headline

Tripod Headline: a headline with a primary headline on the left covering two lines, next to lines of secondary headline

Hammer Headline: a headline style that features one or more lines of primary headline above one or more lines of a secondary headline

Modular Design: a design system that views a page as a stack of rectangles

Text Wrap: text that wraps around an image

L-Shaped Text Flow: L-shaped article with an image or something in the bend of the L

U-Shaped Text Flow: the same as above except it's a U

Other High School Newspapers

1. My favorite newspaper front page that I saw was The Broadview from Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco. I like it because the layout is clean and professional looking. They have important articles on the front as well as a table of contents and nothing ridiculous or embarrassing. I also like how the title has the Golden Gate Bridge in it.

2. The Viking Saga from Northwest High in Grand Island, Nebraska immediately caught my eye because of how horrible it was. It's so ridiculous.

3. My favorite headline was "A Primer on Memes" because what respectable paper publishes an article like that? It's so cringworthy, it's hilarious.

4. Nine headlines, they have all the articles in the paper listed.

5. All the fonts are modern fonts. They're not really gothic like The New York Times of The Boston Globe. The titles are typically the largest text on the page and more often than not, there are no stories on the front page, just a picture and maybe some headlines.

6. Some newspapers were broadsheets and others were news magazines.

7. To be honest, I didn't see a lot of consistent similarities other then that almost all the newspapers used the same techniques to make their front cover look appealing.

Intro to Newspaper Design Assignment

1. My favorite newspaper I looked at was the Pacific Daily News in Hagatna, Guam because their focal point on the front page was an article titled "Boy Wizard guilty of murder" and that's awesome.

2. As I stated above, my favorite headline was "Boy Wizard guilty of murder" and it's because it's hilarious. They were really hard pressed for news that day!

3. There are three stories on the front page of my favorite newspaper.

4. All of the newspapers (with the exception of the one from Tokyo) had a big photo on the cover as their focus. also, almost all of them except The Guardian have a little sidebar on the front page that tells you what stories are inside.

5. I noticed that with the newspapers in Chinese and Japanese, the headlines were smaller. I also noticed that when I clicked on random newspapers from NYC, I got The New York Times, a Hebrew newspaper, and a Chinese newspaper. I just thought it was interesting how NYC's cultural diversity was reflected here.

Column Assignment

It's 6:30 on a Friday, twilight is just closing in on the city, and Stacy Pool is closed for the night. However, the water is still bustling with activity. A group of teenagers stand soaking wet and gasping for breath at the side of the pool. They have just completed what many of them will consider the hardest thing they have ever done.

When they first arrived, the tasks seemed simple enough. Nine laps in the pool, diving to retrieve a brick from the deep end, and then treading water for two minutes. It would be an easy test, they thought, and the reward would be great,  becoming a lifeguard for the city of Austin.

Boy, were they wrong.

They pushed off the wall to begin their first lap. The first three laps would be the front crawl, the next the breast stroke, and then the front crawl again to finish up. It was almost too simple, they thought. They were runners, dancers, football players, athletes not easily defeated by a little water.

By the end, they were struggling to keep their strokes looking like a somewhat passable freestyle.

And then there was the brick. Ten pounds and covered with a layer of black rubber, thrown into the deep end of the pool. The students gasped for breath, bent over with exhaustion as their teachers, current lifeguards explained the rules. The challenge was to swim out to it, surface dive to retrieve it, and bring it back. All within a minute and 40 seconds and without wearing goggles.  

At the beginning of the class, their were 30 kids. After the brick, there were 20.

The final labor was treading water. Not herculean necessarily but difficult none the less, especially following the other two tasks. They kicked furiously for two minutes, keeping their arms trapped beneath their armpits.

"Time!" The lifeguard, a tiny blonde girl who can't be much older than them, shouts.

The kids, gulping for air, hoist themselves out of the pool. They've done. They passed.

"Damn," one boy in saggy blue trunks says. "That was damn hard. That might be the hardest thing I've ever done in my life."

Current Events Quiz 5.2

1. It has been revealed that Haruka Weiser was sexually assaulted and strangled. The sources are police officials but they decided to go unnamed due to the fact that they were not authorized to speak about the case. They probably shared the information because the police thought that it was important to share this valuable information with the public. This story is significant because of it's proximity, timing, and novelty.

2. According to hired.com, 69% of the time, men get paid more than women for doing the same job at a tech company and that tech employers are offering women salaries that are 3% less than that of their male counterparts. Hired.com is a website that connects tech employers to those seeking jobs in the tech industry so they have an insider view the industry and were able to gather this information because of that. Hired.com suspects that this is because women have lower wage expectations set on the website than men do. This theory doesn't really change the way I see the technology companies. Despite the fact that the women told them that this is how much they would like to be paid, they thought it was the appropriate amount because of the universal wage throughout all industries and the tech companies are playing into that. I don't really know about promoting hired.com but they did mention it's name quite a bit and I feel like they could have used more sources to support the article.

3. McCrory's executive order changed South Carolina's equal employment policy so that it would cover discrimination claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The American Civil Liberties Union responded by calling McCrory's action a weak attempt to save face after being criticized by the LGBTQ community. PayPal, Deutsche Bank, the NBA, and Bruce Springsteen have all either canceled, put on hold, or threatened to retract events or plans happening in the state in protest of the law. I think they would probably explain the executive order the same way.

4. According to UNICEF, terrorist group Boko Haram has increasingly used child bombers this past year. As a result, people are starting to see children, especially girls, as threats. Terrorism experts refuse to call these bombings suicide attacks because the children carrying them out either did not do it on their own volition or were too young to understand the consequences of their actions. Boko Haram has aligned itself with al-Qaida because, like them, their goal is to create an Islamic caliphate. The difference is that they are located in Nigeria, whereas al-Qaida's area of operations is predominately in the Middle East. According to a new Mercy Corps report, most people join Boko Haram for financial reasons.

5. Clifford Antone Foundation aims to bolster music scene: A new foundation has been created in honor of the legendary blues club operator and Austinite, Clifford Antone. The foundation aims to support the Austin music scene while also caring for it's more elderly members. It also plans to preserve music artifacts for future generations, improving music education, and mentoring at-risk kids interested in music. I really like this article because 1) I am very interested in music, 2) I've shopped and been to shows at Antone's Records and he was someone that I very deeply respect, and 3) I completely agree with the new foundation's mission and look forward to hearing about their work in the music community.

6. I think that this column definitely has more personality than the other news pieces. It's unique format and individual voice make it seem like Bohls is addressing us directly and sharing his thoughts and opinions with us, as if we were having a conversation. I liked #8 the best because it was funny. If I would cut any one, it would be #4 just because I didn't like how long it was. 

Best Day In Sports Rough Draft

You would be hard pressed to find a day where I even moderately enjoyed playing a sport. The problem was not that I was unathletic. Quite the contrary, as ballet had assured that my body from ages seven to about fourteen was finely muscled and taut and that my endurance was nothing to scoff at. I simply lacked, among other things, the competitive streak necessary to enjoy and succeed in sports. I was a quiet, creative child. I lived for art class, visits to the library, and choir performances. I dreaded track and field day, the capture the flag games everyone loved to play during recess, and any P.E. unit other than gymnastics and line dancing. While the other kids whined and complained about having recess indoors, I relished it because it meant that I could sit quietly at my desk and read a book. My point is, the ratio of bad sports days to good sports days is about 203:1. This is the story of that one, singular good sports day.

When I was twelve, I had a ridiculous notion to join a softball team. My mom had played it when she was growing up in the suburbs of Houston and my dad,being from Chicago, was a long-suffering Cubs fan and played baseball all throughout his youth. It just made sense to carry on the family tradition. I, however, did not take into consideration that I hated sports, hated being outside for extended periods of time, and had the hand-eye coordination of a 100-year-old blind dog.

The first week of being on a softball team was the best. Granted, the only time I ever touched a ball or a glove that week was in the sporting goods store, practice hadn’t started yet. That day in the sporting goods store was the best day I ever had in sports. I hadn’t realized I hated softball yet. Everything was still ripe with excitement, every piece of equipment I piled into the shopping cart, from cleats that had the distinctive plastic-y smell of a new car to an aluminum bat that glowed with a steely sheen, seemed to radiate promise and opportunity. I got black knee length pants and purple stirrup socks to match my brand new jersey and visor, both of which had “Lady Pumas #9” proudly emblazoned in white on both the front and the back. My new glove was Wilson brand and left handed. My cleats had a flashy, girlish, baby pink swoop splashed across each side. I was prepared.

Prepared for hell, that is. The next week I found softball to be hot, sticky, grueling work that I absolutely had no patience for. I never played any position other than outfield, never hit a ball, and quit as soon as the season was over.

Finding the Flaw Response

Here's the T, I don't really care about football so I'm gonna side with The Times on this one. The article they wrote was completely valid and if the NFL has a problem with that then maybe they should work on being a better organization because I really have no issue in believing what The Times wrote about them. I am gonna say though, they could've cited more of their sources because I can see where the NFL is coming from with all this "insinuating" business. I don't think they should retract the article. If they did then what's even the point of journalism?

Gisondi Article Outline

• Sports stories contribute greatly to the world of sports
• But sometimes writers don’t give sports stories the attention and credit they deserve
• A good example of excellent sports news reporting is that of the NBA Finals Game 6
• Elements of a sports story:
• Storyline
• Context
• Quotes
• Key players
• Key Statistics

• Storyline:
• Follows what happened in the game
• Must keep readers engaged, especially if they already watched the game
• Game 6 of the NBA Finals
• Dirk Nowitzki-did well
• LeBron James-did poorly
• Journalists compared the two in their stories
• Ledes: Nowitzki and James compared, James did bad, Nowitzki victorious
• Context:
• Nut graph has who, what, when, where, why, and how
• Who the important players were
• What game it was, what was the outcome
• When it happened
• Where it happened
• Why/how that outcome came to be
• Quotes
• Don’t just interview the local team, interview anyone you might think would contribute to the story
• Reaction quotes
• Quotes also offer analysis of the game
• Key Plays
• Keep notes during the game of plays used, runs, or anything special like that
• Example: The Dallas Mavericks vs. the Miami Heat by Eddie Sefko, Dallas Morning News, Joseph Goodman, The Miami Herald, Howard Beck, NY Times, Tim Reynolds, Associated Press

• Key Statistics
• Don’t put in every  statistic in, it will bore the readers if you do
• Look for stats that might not appear in the box score
• Compare stats from each quarter or half

• Covering games can be hard, here’s how to make it easier:
• Do research before the game
• Plan to take notes
• Come up with good questions beforehand