"Freshman Survival 102: A very bad Spring Break" doesn't have a bad Lead!

Freshman Lisa Magedler submitted an article to the Opinion section of the Hurricane titled "Freshman Survival 102: A very bad Spring Break." Her lead is written as follows:

"Every year, college kids across the nation flock to exotic places like Cancun, Europe and Booze Cruises around the Caribbean. These exotic trips don't usually pay for themselves, and if you don't have your parents to fork over the Almighty Dollar, your plans for Spring Break might become limited."

This is an salient feature lead because it's focusing on one aspect of spring break in particular: money. I thought this was an efficient way to not only hook the reader's attention but also introduce what she discusses in the rest of the article. For an article such as this one, the lead Magedler chose is extremely effective. Other leads that could have worked well for a story like this include anecdotal, scene-setter, and contrast. Actually, a contrast lead could be even more interesting than the one she uses. She implies a contrast between expensive spring break trips and trips for those without the "Almighty Dollar," but she could have played up this contrast more to make an interesting contrast lead.

Absence of Malice: Absence of Professionalism

"Absence of Malice" is a very educational movie for aspiring journalists. Whatever you see Sally Field's character doing, DON'T DO IT. "Absence of Malice" is the ultimate "what not to do" of journalism. Sally Field's character, Megan Carter, is a reporter for a newspaper in Miami. Some of her many errors include: obtaining information illegally/immorally, failure to contact a variety of sources, publishing off the record information, drinking on the job, and many more. As a result of these many failures, Megan ends up publishing a story that fasely accuses a man of murder. When she writes a story to vindicate him, she uses an allibi that was given to her off the record. When the source of this allibi sees the story published in the paper, she commits suicide. It was the many errors Megan made that led to these consequences.
Even though she made many mistakes, I noted a very important aspect of journalism that Megan did actually manage to grasp: backgrounding. She spent a lot of time getting the accused murder's background story, which is very important to every story published in journalism. It's just too bad this is the only thing Megan got right throughout the whole movie. Sorry, Sally Field, it doesn't look like journalism is in your future.