There are no shortages of commentary on the 56th GRAMMY Awards. What was great, what was awkward, and what just didn’t work. Three different news outlets provided different types of coverage of the night, and each had it’s own voice and take on the show.
The Professional
CNN’s coverage stayed true to their standard voice: professional and straight-forward. Their list format of the top five aspects of the show was to the point and made it easy to read. The top points were bolded, and caught my eye so I could easily scan the article to read what I wanted. Like most awards shows, there are a lot more than five memorable moments, but they stuck to the highlights. Some were more general, like “The new faces did well” in regards to artists like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Lorde, and others were more specific, like “Pharrell’s hat”. (Really. There’s multiple Twitter accounts dedicated to it.)
The Irreverent
The LA Times’ piece was less formatted than CNN’s, and definitely wandered towards the irreverent at times. While they had very extensive coverage and it was broken into smaller paragraphs, there were no headings to distinguish the different portions of the article. They did, though, include a wide variety of pictures from the event at the top of the article. They loaded quickly and were user-friendly, which is something I look for in an article. (Loading the whole page for each new picture? Uh-uh.) However, it ended strong, and gave a good overall view of the event, even with the lack of scannability.
The Play-by-Play
The Guardian’s play-by-play coverage brought the typical British sense of humour to live coverage of the GRAMMYs. It’s easy to read, with the times on the left and blocks of text in the center. The article begins with a background on this year’s GRAMMYs and what they’ve been told to expect. As the night goes on, there were quotes, pictures, and embedded YouTube videos. The entries get shorter, as well, with a bolded “Winner!” and a brief paragraph about the artist. Some focused on their performance, some on their year, and some about their acceptance speech.
Out of the three, The Guardian’s coverage was my favorite, mostly due to the play-by-play structure, though all had good points and covered the GRAMMYs well.
A Pen Still Works 