I looked on CNN.com for a story for which I could respond. I decided upon a story about a Topps beef contamination where a girl was hospitalized for ecoli (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/10/02/candiotti.mystery.at.sea.cnn) This story touched on many techniques, and I could see room for improvement. The sourcing in this package was very well done. We heard from the attorney, the girl, her mother as well as a woman form the Center for Science in the Public Interest about meat trends. During the interview of the girl and her mother, the shots were very close up which was more intimate and gave a good emotional background.

I was disappointed with the diversity of shots. I saw a lot of buildings (almost every building involved in the story). I also saw a lot of the same hamburger package in several different shots. The one good shot was in the Topps processing plant and there were more opportunities for moving images here. I also thought that the reporter used a nice split frame between the three shots of the sources of the contamination. This provided a nice visual element to bring the story a bit more to life.

The story got the job done, but it lacked the elements to make it pop like more interesting shots as well as natural sound. There were not many opportunities for it in the story, but the reporter did not capitalize on the opportunities that he had. If this was a text only story it would have been pretty similar, but it would not have had the emotional element of the girl and her mother. Since these were used only at the beginning and very briefly, the impact of a text-only versus this story would have been pretty similar.