Newspaper articles have been around for decades and are still present today. Although technology has been advancing over the past decade, newspaper articles are still being published in order to inform the public about issues that are occuring in their city. My project is a successful example of the newspaper article genre because contains various components that correlate together to make it a credible piece of writing.

Some of the conventions I used were the byline, dateline, and headline. These three conventions basically provides basic information such as the name of the author of the article (byline), a heading where it states the place where the story is being reported from (dateline), and the title of the article (headline). In addition, the first few sentences of the story tell the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) called the lead. This provides a brief description of what the news story will be about and will have a hook that catches the public’s attention. After the lead paragraph, the following paragraphs give an explanation and specific details about the shocking news. These body paragraphs will contain quotes of anyone who was interviewed in order to provide viable support for my story. Most news stories are structured by using the inverted pyramid, which helps illustrate what information should be focused on the most. It is broken down into three sections: “The Lead” (the most important information), “The Body” (the crucial information), “The Tail” (extra information).

As a rhetor, I am remaining invisible and creating a person, in this case a reporter, in order to send out the message in the most effective way possible. Making myself invisible allows the message to be credible, since reporters do have to be accredited in order to publish their work. If I were to make myself visible, I would just be another person in the world with a formed opinion of the issue with no evidence to prove my statement. I am making the rhetor of my text a reporter named Margaret Jones from a news corporation and is writing a newspaper article about an event that recently occurred. This reporter comes from a family that is not wealthy and has been a fan of Team Flash since she can remember. Her dream has always been to be a reporter that writes the articles specifically for The Flash. This makes her work biased and preferably takes the side of the Flash. She will will use previous cases of The Flash team to back up her statement and will purposely do this to communicate to the audience that regardless of how good a person is, there is a vulnerable side to every person.

I chose to write the newspaper article based on the TV show The Flash and chose this topic because it incorporates the common struggles of young adults, the main audience, even though it does use the supernatural world to present these struggles. My newspaper article is intended to target young adults who have watched the TV show or are somewhat familiar with the show because the key message of this news story is that a friendship/family bond is stronger than any obstacle placed in front of them. This is shown when Team Flash put their fear aside and tell Iris what is happening to her, not only for the safety of the city, but because of the the strong love and care they have for each other. During the time of the text, there was a criminal who was destroying Central City and Team Flash was unable to come to a conclusion as to who it was, so this was a major concern for the team and the city as well. The moment the team found out, that’s when the truth came to light to the public, which is why I decided to make the even recent in the year 2017 and named the news outlet “Central City Times”. This is similar to my model because the news outlet for it was the New York Times and I changed it up in order to make it credible to the setting which was Central City. I also chose my headline to say “Iris West is a Villain?” because it leaves the audience wanting to know the answer to the question. It will come to a shock to know that people believe she can potentially be a villain, since she is Barry Allen’s (The Flash) girlfriend.

With reading the headline, it immediately captivates the reader, since this discovery is unexpected, and will allow the suspense to build up. Another component that I emphasized on was the picture that is attached to the newspaper article. At first, I had chosen a photo of the city at night where you were able to see the way central city looked everyday, but I changed it a more darker setting to make it look spooky and appeal to the audiences emotions. I came to this conclusion because the picture gives a visual representation of how the city was under destruction after the attacks of Iris west. This picture also has a caption saying Central City Under Attack and it ties into the headline because it brings to mind that Iris West is the one causing this destruction.

 Overall, I based my decisions on the examples I saw online. I realized that there are different ways to format a newspaper article, but in the end, they all share one thing in common and that is the basic information it contains such as the byline, dateline, headline. The way the message is being presented may vary but the goal is the same and that is to keep the public informed with the latest news. Therefore, my newspaper article uses the same conventions as any other newspaper article with a small twist on the story plot which is bringing to life the supernatural world.

However the message still relates to real life situations, it is just being portrayed differently.