Because I am a Journalism Student...

As I was surfing the Internet today I stumbled upon a news article titled "Restaurant gives Fla. toddler sangria, not juice;" which caught my eye for obvious reasons. As I was reading the article, which was very short, I quickly noticed the formatting and sentence structure was not correct and that it was actually very confusing. Even after reading it I was still not completely sure what the 5 W's and H of the story were. I ended up having to form my own conclusions about what happened and made an overall decision that the story was useless.

Coming to this realization is what made me search for the author of the story and what I found left me very disappointed. The article was distributed by none other than Associated Press- the bible of the journalism industry. The fact that they would publish something so poorly written, confusing and with bad grammar to boot is unthinkable.

Not only that but the article has been shared with over 3,000 people on Facebook and over 30 on Twitter, which who knows how many times the article has been retweeted since. If such a reputable and influential company can actually publish something like that, allow it to go to press and put it on the Internet where any and everything is capable of going viral then anything goes at this point. The AP Stylebook is a symbol of journalism, show it to any journalist and they will know what it is and how to use it. One would think that as a company Associated Press would take more pride in the work that they put out to the public. Especially, since to some people they represent the field of journalism and journalism standards. Perhaps they need a bit more PR on their team.

Besides the fact that the story is terrible as a whole, it is actually quite shady (which might be attributed to the confusing formatting). It's not too clear whether they have their facts straight and if I were the editor (or Professor Bufkins) I would have definitely done some fact checking of my own before the story was published. If the story wasn't interesting on its own there would be absolutely no purpose in releasing such a poorly-written article. I didn't get any information past the headline.