How not to start a story

I got to Whitehorse safe and sound and after a day of jetlag, picked up the two local papers to start sessing out issues. At first glance, layout is very different from Australia (very consistent page-wide layout), photo captions are different, headlines are centered. Then I started flipping through headlines. The first observed error in the Yukon News was that the comics were duplicated-Dilbert was Adam and Adam was Adam…think the sub was sleeping. Then I got to the stories. The caption by a former Yukon News reporter now working out of Ghana caught my attention. It read: UN weaning Liberia out of Ghana. The story was actually talking about the Refuge camp I was volunteering in this past January. The story opened with Buduburam, Ghana “It’s hard to write about a thing when you know next to nothing about it.” Now I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that is a really bad way to start a story because it doesn’t lend much creadibility to what is to come. I’m glad I’m interning with the other paper!