I have decided to change my New York Times reporter. I now intend to cover Patricia Mazzei’s writing.
Brief Context –
Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. I chose her as my model because she was born and raised in Venezuela, the same place of my own heritage –I hope to articulate a similar unique perspective to my writing, as she is able to within the paper. Her style is simple, but she uses a lot of emotive language throughout, keying into human right’s issues, especially related to gender.
Patricia Mazzei predominantly covers sociopolitical affairs in Florida and Puerto Rico. Her articles are chiefly written in a way that elicit strong emotion by addressing wider social concerns such the impacts of Opioids and human trafficking.
Her leads are very impactful. She often writes in the perspective of victims and uses strong quotes. She tends to choose the classic style news lead when the topic she covers has inherently impactful notions such when Trump addressed president Nicolás Maduro.
Her articles are extremely in depth, exploring multiple perspectives on the given issue and always assessing its national implications. The length of her articles tend to be longer, following this general format: news/perspective/news/perspective etc. She is very good at pin pointing the wider effects of Southern Floridian social issues, as she recognizes the unique Hispanic diversity within the region and how this population is increasingly becoming more influential in general American politics.
Mazzei makes an effective use of quotes, often times incorporating shorter single-worded quotes within her sentences to reinforce a paragraphs overall sentiment.
Mazzei’s nutgrafs tend to be located in the fourth or fifth paragraph. This style is effective because she gives detailed explanations of the current “news”, allowing readers to know its inherent significance, and then broadening its scope to open readers mind’s to how it’s wider impact has national implications.
Her sentence structure is very powerful because they always end strong, leaving readers to think seriously about her news.
I find her articles to be extremely insightful and interesting, especially since she is covering a region that directly impacts my own community. I appreciate her writing style because I recognize my own voice within it. Her articles are easy to read and to understand – she makes them accessible to the populations she writes about.
Mazzei’s use of personalized perspectives gives color to her articles, adding a powerful element of the human within them – this allows readers to feel more connected to her pieces as they come to life, giving reporting more “humanly” significance.