Partner: Daryl

This CNN article is an example of hard news. This story is important to readers due to the following criteria: timeliness ,human interest and consequence and impact. The article was released just two days after the shooting occurred, making the news very recent and relevant. The shooting, although it had occurred in USA, a country far away from Singapore, had greatly injured and even killed a large group of people. As a reader, I would empathise with the victims, their loved ones as well as the community of Las Vegas. As I have mentioned before, a large group of people had been impacted by the shooting. Loved ones of the victims are mourning their lost loved ones, others distraught over the victims’ state of health and the people of the community of Nevada, terrified for their safety in their own hometown.

The first paragraph of the had summarised the events of the article , including details of what the shooter had done and the amount of weapon arsenal he had in his home and in his hotel. I think that the writer of this article placed this information at the top of the story to intrigue the reader and encourage them to read more to find out about what had happened during the shooting and how it impacted the victims.

The second and third paragraph actually links back to the first paragraph, but gives more detailed information. The exact number of the shooter’s weapon arsenal, the number of people he had killed and injured, alongside the phrase that it was ‘the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history’ emphasises how the severe the situation was.

In this article, the reporter utilises various sources to find out what had happened. They had questioned Clark Country’s assistant sheriff, Todd Fasulo, to find out more about the shooter’s weapon’s arsenal, while the authorities provided the number of victims of the shooting. They had also asked a few victims and eye-witnesses for their recounts of their experience during the shooting. Asking the shooter’s brother, Erik Paddock, also gave reader’s a perspective of the shooter.

This article provided us with quite a lot of data which stress this severe situation such as the exact number of people injured and killed, the total time of the shooting and the number of weapons the shooter had in his arsenal.

After this event, CNN could follow up with stories about the loved ones of the victims, find out more about how they felt when they heard the news of the shooting , their feelings afterwards and how they were coping after the event. They could also do pieces on the families grieving those losses during the shooting. CNN could also do stories on how people feel about USA’s gun laws and how they would want them to change after this incident.