Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Starbucks Shrine

The article is about an old man who became a regular presence at a New York Starbucks. The man sat in the same purple chair every day, which seemed to represent him by it’s permanence and cheerful demeanor. However, people were shocked to hear he was dead one day. His chair became a sort of shrine to him, with letters and flowers left there. His past, which had previously been unknown, soon came out and made his acquaintances realize what kind of man he really was: a fun-loving, flirtatious homeless man.

The material in the article is very relevant to our class and society, even though it's not very obvious. The message of the article is that even one man, seemingly menial in the lives of many, actually had the power to affect those people in ways they never would have realized until he was gone. The message to our class is a lesson about the content of our writing. It teaches that a small event that will touch the hearts of many can make just as good of a story, if not better, than a major event that is impersonal. Personally, it helped me come to the conclusion that the only way to write a good story that people will want to read and care about is to care about it myself and make it a close to home story.

My only questions are about how the story came to be reported on. Did the author of the story know the man to whom the shrine was dedicated? How did the press find out about the story and what made them think it was important enough to report on. I liked the article because it indirectly gave us a lesson on how we should undergo writing our own stories. I would like to see more articles like that. Ones that have a lesson, but are also interesting to read and don't directly relate back to journalism.


2 comments:

  1. I'm intrigued by your closing thought: Because it is a work of journalism, isn't it related back to journalism? I think we can learn a lot from well-written samples, which is what I THINK you're getting at in your response.

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  2. Yes that is what I am getting at. More articles that aren't ABOUT journalism like the first one was, but ones that we have to find the lesson on our own.

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