I like the idea here a lot, a proper monster movie creature that ends up being more than it seems, but it feels really unfocused. There's a lot of storylines here that end up sort of either convoluting the main through line of the article, or end up not really going anywhere interesting. For example, the final part of the article, where George Johnson is killed because of the Authority ignoring his calls and various other issues, doesn't really work as an emotional closer, because the article spends so much time away from his plotline.
There are attempts to address this issue, with stuff like how the Gaige Rivers interview mentions the indians considering the island sacred land, which ties into the blackfoot ritual used at the end of the article, but its buried in several hundred words of dialogue that explain information we could either already assume or don't change much.
A large part of this can be attributed to the Authority infighting subplot, which contributes nothing to the other themes, distracts from the story at several moments and extends logs to a much higher amount. The submersible log spends nearly 600 words purely on McGinnis and Byron's argument. I understand the idea here is attempting to show how the infighting lead to problems containing the anomaly and caused major SNAFUs, but it just kind of feels ridiculous when you describe how something happens, and it just feels like fluff in the discussion logs.
Additionally, I think there was some major misuse of the footnotes here. Specifically 3, 9 and 10. I think it makes very little sense for Byron to put a note basically written to himself to air grievances as a footnote, nor for it to remain several months after that incident. Additionally 9 should just be cut, its almost comedically daft. 10 should not have been a footnote, and should've been part of the text itself.
I think if you dealt with some of these problems it would make for a much tighter and more interesting article. Imagine if instead of ending the incident log with the July snafu, it foreshadows what happens to the Johnson's on August 26th. Or if instead of George dying from an ASF shooting him, he gets killed by a partially reanimated Lee, in the process of being turned into a 419. I mean honestly the fact that the fucking chain-link fence has more importance than one of the initial victims who kicks off this article is ridiculous.
