Headline: Amazon halts all employee travel, Nike closes Oregon campus
While the lead is a straightforward hard news lead, I like how Maddox, the author makes clear that it is unexpected, and therefore more newsworthy.
She adds weight to the story with the statistic in the second paragraph. As a reader, seeing that 800,000 employees are being restricted from traveling is an alarming number.
Context is important in any story, and Maddox does a good job of pitting the 800,000 employees of Amazon against the 70 US confirmed cases of coronavirus, as well as 3,000 deaths and 83,000 cases worldwide.
The story then moves on to Google, which has expanded its employee travel restrictions. I don’t like the specificity of the article’s headline, since it does not even mention Google, yet the story does. The headline could have been more general, like “US Companies Respond to coronavirus impact.”
The article includes a statement from an unnamed Google spokesperson, which states that an employee from the Zurich office was diagnosed with the virus, prompting the travel restrictions. However, the employee was in Zurich, Switzerland, which seems irrelevant to them adding South Korea and Japan to the list of restricted countries.
Nike, rather than Google, is listed in the headline, but it gets less print space than Google did. There are merely two paragraphs about Nike. The first says that the company is deep cleaning its headquarters following a case of the virus in Washington County, Oregon. The second is another statement from unnamed “Nike officials.”
The article quickly moves away from Nike to the impact on tech conferences and events around the world. I like the statistics in this paragraph, namely that there has been a 500% increase in the cancellation or postponement of events, including 220 in February. The article lists some of the major cancelled events, before turning into sort of a how-to article.
The tips in the article seem useful, such as keeping schedules flexible and booking flights that allow cancellations or changes. It was just off-putting to see this kind of thing in an article that had began as what seemed a hard news article.
Maddox breaks off into another section at the end with more advice on how bosses should handle their employees about travel and the virus. While, again, I was surprised to see content like this in the article, I found the information interesting and insightful, albeit only useful for the limited number of people in supervisory roles their companies.
Overall, this article was an interesting take on the coronavirus, coming from a different angle than the usual personal health that is in the big media outlets. It provided a look into how the tech industry is dealing with the issue, and showing that coronavirus is affecting a growing number of people in a variety of situations.