Articles 3 and 4. Draft

Donald M. Murray, in Writing to Deadline, distinguishes journalism from literature which is a form of art. He says “After graduation I wrote journalism and dreamt literature.” He had firmly believed that journalism was not literature, this idea he seems to credit to a English degree. This was until one day, when that he realized all art is first craft. To him, it seems, this validated his work. He could take pride in his journalism as a fine piece of literature.
Murray, who says he grew up in a world of contradictions, writes “stories explained the world, found cause and effect in confusion, sequence in contradiction, order in disorder.” Early in his life he studied the stories of life. His curiosity taught him to find the details of a story. He learned to answer the who, what when, where, how, and why in order to make sense of information. In Writing to Deadline, he writes that his mother complained that “Donald can hear the grass grow.” He heard everything. He writes “I was a listener, a watcher, a spy, a sneak.” He acquired and instinct for story.
Murray says that school teaches students to write long but looking back at some of his stories from just third grades, he says that this type of writing is “surprisingly close” to how he writes today, with “strong verbs, specific nouns, short sentences.” he learned “less is more” and he had to learn change his writing styles from complex to simple, words are became symbols for information. Meaning, he says, now came from connections between pieces of information rather than connection between words.
He says that the lede is what is important in the story. Ledes direct an article. The lede, he claims, became his obsession. He says he would write an everage of about 75 ledes for a story. When read them, he would know which to pick and then he would know what to write about.
Michael Lewis wrote a series of articles, in the style of a travel writers, on what he calls his “financial disaster tour.” In this series, he includes a piece about California and a piece about Iceland.
Lewis’s article, California and Bust covers the economic crisis in the United States and in California. The article begins by explaining that the United States bill is too large to be paid. Meredith Whitney, a private wall street analyst, predicted “that the Citigroup’s losses in U.S. subprime bonds were far bigger than anyone imagined, and predicted the bank would be forced to cut its dividend” and when asked when people should begin to worry about a financial crisis, she said “It’ll be something to worry about within the next 12 months.” This statement, Lewis claims was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“People started worrying about U.S. municipal finance the minute the words were out of her mouth. The next day the municipal-bond market tanked. It kept falling right through the next month.”
Whatever else she had done, Meredith Whitney had found the pressure point in American finance: the fear that American cities would not pay back the money they had borrowed.