Critiquing a Contempoary News Article: Oil Spill in Texas

"Cleanup under way in 462,000-gallon spill off Texas"

I think that this article is a very good example of how to use the components of a story outlined in Melvin Mencher's Text, "News Reporting and Writing". The article is from CNN's website, a very well known and respected news source in the United States.The story reports on a massive oil spill that occurred in Texas, about one hundred miles away of Houston. Oil spills are certainly a scary event for many reasons. The industry is losing the oil that was spilled, as well as the equipment that broke causing the spill: two barges and a tanker that contained the oil. In addition to this, the environmental aspects of an oil spill are always the first to come to mind. With this being said, I think that this article does a nice job of covering all of the crucial facts of the story in an appropriate way if we are to grade it using Mencher's criteria.
For example, I thought that the way the information was presented in the article was brief and focused. The article only spans for approximately a full page on the internet, and yet it contained all of the necessary information to get the story across. I feel like the information was as accurate as it could be, even though there was a lot of secondhand and thirdhand information in the story. Direct quotes backed up the journalists story as he or she told it. Considering the situation, I think that CNN got the most accurate information available, as it would be extremely fortuitous if a journalist from CNN had been at the right place at the right time to actually see the accident occur. And when I say fortuitous, I am strictly talking about the reporting on the story itself, not the actual accident.
One thing in particular that I think the CNN journalist did especially well was anticipating the questions that readers may have while reading the article, and then supplying the appropriate information to leave the reader satisfied, which is one of the components Mencher keys in on in his text. Personally, as I was reading the article, the natural questions that I was thinking were answered almost immediately after I thought them. For example, I was wondering if there were any injuries, to humans or animals. Shortly after the initial information about the accident was presented, the journalist wrote about the fact that there were no human injuries, and that only one heron was "oiled".
Overall I believe the article was well written, stayed very objective, and gave all of the information necessary to give the people a clear view of this horrible accident in Texas.