Finally, a "Happy" News Story

Normally, a typical adjective for a plane crash is "tragic." US Airways Flight 1549 yesterday, however, can be described as miraculous: How often do crashes result in the rescue of every single person? Most plane crashes have few or little survivors, and when there are survivors, the media's focus is on those who died. This was not the case yesterday, as the New York Times' front-page article shows. The first half of the article relies on descriptive language to set the scene of the rescue in the Hudson river before going into technical details on the flight later in the article. This was a good choice because readers want to know "What happened?" and "What was the outcome?" before they want to know "How did this occur?". Also, the quotes and reactions of those who saw the plane go down helped to describe the scene, but I think they needed to interview more than just one survivor so the reader could see more of what was going on inside the plane. All in all, though, it was a good article, and it certainly described the mood that this plane was not sad, but "miraculous".
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/nyregion/16crash.html