On a Quest for Well Written News – Untold Media goes hunting « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

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“Making the Arsenal” – is available on Amazon, Arsenal on line, the Woolwich Arsenal site and in the Arsenal store.

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by Gordon Haverland

There was a movie called Quest For Fire back in 1981 (according to Wikipedia). I think I seen it once on TV, late at night. But, in surfing through pages of news search engine listings, I find myself thinking of this movie.

In any event, I am trying to restrict myself to news sites and articles written by professional journalists. For such sites that are a web presence for a (dead tree) newspaper or magazine, I can see a reason for lumping a description of many games into 1 article. For news sites that are a web presence for a TV channel, or purely existing on the web, there is no reason to summarize things this way. I am looking for articles which are solely about Arsenal at Wigan. I got sidetracked at the end.

The English press has a problem with Arsenal. My knowledge of the game is from following the two play by play “files” which the BBC runs (one is specific to the game in question with timing, the other is a running commentary). Some news articles think it was a miracle of some kind that allowed Santos to block a shot early, others allow for Santos to have some skill to effect the block. Likewise, some articles suggest that Al Habsi gifted Arsenal the first goal, while others think that the ball had a path which Al Habsi couldn’t predict, and hence was scored on.

Unrelated to the game against Wigan, it seems a couple of people important to Football died in the last week or so (Gary Speed and Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira). My condolences to those close to either family. And from the weekend, it sounded like there were 4 “teams” playing at Villa Park: Aston Villa, Manchester United, Lee Probert and his assistants, and the AV grounds crew. I don’t think Shay Given was hurt by the facilities, but it appears that the grounds crew got Jermaine Jenas and Javier Hernandez with that stealth sprinkler head.

The Straits Times of Singapore Wenger demands more despite Arsenal romp looks like they found a reasonable canned news article and ran with it. It may be that they wrote the article themselves, but quite a few other news articles seemed to have very similar titles.

Sportal seems to have a number of country websites. A number of them may resolve to a single server, in any event it appears their India, New Zealand and Australia sites are the same. A no nonsense title of Wigan 0 : Arsenal 4. They do fall into the group which thinks Santos was lucky to block the shot.

iSport from India had a nice title for their article: Arsenal Surge To Move Back Into The Top 5. They note that Santos blocked that shot, but don’t embellish it in any way. For Arteta’s goal, they seem to be of the opinion that the shot itself handcuffed Al Habsi, not a gift.

Taiwan News also likes to romp: Arsenal romps to 4-0 win at Wigan in EPL. They do seem to have a few sister sites of similar names. Short article, but it does update statistics on van Persie (14th goal, 17 goals in 19 games) and Vermaelen (3rd in 4 games), and they mention that Gervinho scored (which is important for all the chances he has had).

Modern Ghana runs with a plain title: Wigan 0 – 4 Arsenal. The report is detailed and positive. A nice read.

Eurosport.com is running a bunch of sister sites, with the title: RVP nets as Arsenal beat Wigan. A sentence/paragraph I like is:

Wigan boss Roberto Martinez, a proud Catalan, took his cue from Barcelona when deploying Wigan in a rather amorphous and unexpected 4-6-0 formation, with Jordi Gomez operating in the Lionel Messi ‘false nine’ role

Fox Sports of Australia celebrates RVP with their title: Robin van Persie on target yet again as resurgent Arsenal crush rock-bottom Wigan Athletic. They seem to think it was Vermaelen that deflected the shot. But I thought it was a nice article.

We have a few articles which seem to combine the game and an interview of Wenger where he was discussing how Robin developed into a scorer.

The Irish Times runs with the title: Arsenal turn on style against woeful Wigan. The article is nice, with a bit more meat by combining the two stories.

The UK International Business Times came up with a couple of articles. The first in the same vein as the Irish Times, had a title of: Arsenal Star Drawing Henry Comparison. Is it fair to point out a typo? Mid article, we find that the manager of Arsenal is Wengerm. Looking at the context, it is obvious the author meant to hit the comma, which is next to the “m” on a QWERTY keyboard. Nice article.

The other article focuses on Thomas Vermaelen with a title of: BBC Football Pundit Lauds Arsenal Defenders Canny Knack. I guess someone at the International Business Times reads or watches what Garth Crooks does, as that is the inspiration for the article. But it seems that TV5 is working himself up the goal scoring list for defenders, already surpassing Emmanuel Petit and Sol Campbell. The obligatory dig for scoring an own goal wasn’t really needed in my mind. Other than that, a pretty good article.

Sure a lot of people know latin in the news business. I suppose it will be a year of wonders (or miracles) if the press learns how to write good articles, and quits trying to stir the pot and get managers fired or cause excessive turnover of players. Hey guys, can I introduce you to a sprinkler at Villa Park?

I hope you enjoyed my Quest for Well Written News. I hope there are no errors (outside of that typo at IBTimes). Manually written in HTML using emacs23.

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