Week 2: Student Response to Discussion One and Two and Assignment

May 5, 2018May 5 at 6:51am

Manage Discussion Entry

This story was a very long story discussing the coal mining industry. To give some background information it went into this industry constantly bringing up cases of young men dying while working in the mines all across states like West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. This investigation also goes into numerous court cases that have been brought up about these mining accidents. These cases were for payouts and for these payouts were absolutely ridiculous amounting to only a few hundred dollars. While it was apparent through reading this story that safety regulations have never been too important to realize or important to facilitate. This composes most of the basics for this investigation.

The reporter has utilized many secondary sources in this piece. A big portion of sources utilized were newspapers for obituaries or just general information. Not only that but many primary documents were taken into account such as birth and death certificates plus marriage certificates. Also, the person who had done this investigation accessed many federal records and court case records. They accessed databases and everything in between considering this story has so much information added to it. However, what must be remembered is that birth and death certificates are not always available to obtain in certain states (Houston, 2009). Apparently, they were in these few states. While this story was very repetitive in how it exposed death after death in the mines it certainly provided secondary and primary sources to acknowledge the fact that this reporter did their research and spent the time to understand the issue at hand.

Another point to make is how this story had contacted local news agencies to put their story together with the help of interviewing those that they thought needed to be interviewed. Not only that, but through this entire process, it is apparent that this person who wrote this story utilized every possible source possible to make this story ever so eye-opening.

References

Houston, B. (2009). The investigative reporter’s handbook: A guide to documents, databases and techniques (5th). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin

DJ