However, at the end of the Venezuela 101 story there is a link to a yahoo news site -- the source of the story. Still, the blog does add its own touches that separate it from both Yahoo News and the NY Times:
1) the title of the blog's post is "Mandela? Candela?" which is a reference to English "Chavista" Ken Livingston's comparison of Chavez to Mandela.
2) After the article, there is a picture of one of the activists and a picture of a character from the Jimmy Kimmel Show. The men look similar and the blog's caption asks: "The Jimmy Kimmel Show's Guillermo?"
3) In response to the Mandela reference, the blogger writes: "Guess Kenny was talkin' bout Winnie 'Together hand-in-hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country' Mandela'."
The NY Times' article is straightforward, dispensing the same facts as the Yahoo News (and therefore the Venezuela 101) story with no detectable commentary. It is fairly brief at ten short paragraphs, features a small picture of the director of Human Rights Watch and a two minute video (which is a video link from Reuters.)
The most striking element of the blog's story is the casual nature of their inside jokes juxtaposed with the gravity of the expulsion story. To compare a Human Rights Activist who was recently exiled from his country to a character on a late night talk show seems at best irrelevant and at worst insensitive. Judging from the other posts on the Venezuela 101 blog, there is a clear attempt to create a personality that is both informative and cavalier, humorous and earnest.
The NY Times' online edition of the story reflects a blog, or at least a more modern news outlet, in its use of multimedia. Still, the actual story -- both the content and the form -- remains formal and informative.
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