Where's Waldo, and his girlfriend..?

      After a month of ultimately no contact, the Sacramento couple reappears in the city of Loreto. Both twenty-five year old, Garret Hand and Jamie Neal, left for a bicycle tour in late November, until they were finally discovered in a small city in Peru. 

     Although no immediate danger was ever really present, the families of the "estranged" travelers were very concerned.  Garrets's sister Alena Hand explained that both of them were constantly communicating via Facebook, internet, etc. and were   curious when all of a sudden everything seemed to have stopped.  Eventually they settled the whole ordeal with a telephone call through the Peruvian Department of Tourism Security. The young couple didn't even know about the effort, and were said to have been, "surprised to hear that their family and friends were in search of them" (along with all the different types of media surrounding their disappearance).

     The proximity of this news story was almost immediately the reason I was drawn to it, and it also had a bizarre twist. Before their "Houdini" act was revealed, the media surrounded the two with a lot of coverage (which in turn, helped the two to eventually be found). The mystery around the story made it very news worthy and for local media it was a "no brainer" but essentially the two were never in any harm.  Looking at that situation very objectively, one can say it was a bunch of wasted news time that might have been put to better use.  

      But in contrast, this story also had a lot of potential to be related to a wide variety of publics, allowing the different media companies to draw in the attention from thousands of people. In this case the media helped a family find and communicate with two people, hundreds of miles away.

Sacramento Bee's Story  

And you were saying..

I found something very interesting, with a little inspiration from the TED video.

For instance I never really thought i would ask myself, " hmm, I wonder how Syria is doing?" Due to many obvious reasons but then I thought to myself, how does such a sensational story like,"Syria death toll likely approaching 70,000, says U.N. rights chief" make it into American media?

So this story involves the 2-year conflict between the people of Syria and the president, Bashar al-Assad.  Due to the escalation of protests and demonstrations, that resulted in the massacre of innocent civilians. Syria was drawn into the inevitable civil war. Many groups on each faction claimed the other to have committed atrocities of war. Thus bringing forth the idea to commit both factions to the International Criminal Court. Mainly to try and send a message that there will be consequences for the both of the parties involved.

Now I started to put together in my own perspective why this might be "news worthy". Human interest in this story alone can explain how people are attracted to the hard pains and reality of war that the civilians must face in their everyday lives; not just fighting armies.  Everyone (even if if their not Syrian) can relate to this story because the "evil doers" in their immense greed of power (either faction, depends on how you look at it) are willing to stomp through the civilians and the common people (us) to get what they desire.  Also the consequence of this story involves a very large number of casualties of war.  Even if your president Bashar al-Assad, the loss of life is very powerful in a sense that death reaches all of our imaginations; not to mention the massive scale of casualties.  Even if you can not relate to both consequence and human interest to make this a valid news story; surely prominence comes into play by introducing the very infamous man, president Bashar al-Assad.  Specifically the region in which Syria is located happens to be a very "hot topic" in the world media in terms of economics, politics and of course war/violence.  To be quite frank many world possibilities can in turn, happen if either side wins the conflict. With unimaginable consequences affecting our country or even our state. 

What currently is taking place in Syria is news worthy because even though its thousands of miles away, this story draws in attention with the possibility to affect our country as a whole; eventually reaching each and every one of us.





"Yahoo story"