Am I nuts or is this the world’s most poorly written news article?
No, a couple of weeks ago someone posted one that was much, much worse.
There’s a comma shortage or haven’t you heard?
There’s some odd punctuation choices, but eh, not the worst writing ever. It’s from the Cherry Hill, N.J. Courier-Post, so I don’t exactly expect Hemingway.
Horrible story, though…
I’ve seen far, far worse. Though I think we deserved an explanation of the criminal charge for “luring”.
I think it’s written really well. I’m always impressed when junior high school newspapers get picked up by the wires.
The punctuation, the narrative style that the opening is written in, the lack of information (motive?)… I’d like to see examples of worse - not that I doubt there is worse out there.
Given that choice, you are nuts.
Well. If that’s supposed to be an inverted paragraph style story, the lead should have all the facts in the first 'graph. You don’t get to any facts until somewhere around the 4th 'graph. The fifth graph would be the best lead, but when combined with the fourth.
I would say that you are not nuts, but this probably isn’t the world’s most poorly written news article. The writer probably shouldn’t have or didn’t graduate from a decent journalism school, but this isn’t bad for, say, a high school paper.
I’ve seen worse, but the paragraphs in the linked article seem to be in a random order. It’s very disjointed.
Meh, I’ve see worse.
I think the worst I ever saw was in the sports section and basically said (and I’m not paraphrasing much)
Interesting. I’m teaching a writing class on “logic and organization” soon, and so I eagerly clicked on your link, hoping for an example I could use as an illustration to share with students.
Instead, I found a “false dilemma” in your question - something I will be telling the class of aspiring writers to look out for. 
Somebody went to the “set the scene” newswriting workshop. It’s an acceptable form for some types of stories, but probably not the way to go when two teenagers are arrested for killing a 12-year old girl and the biggest story the Cherry Hill Post will cover this year.
As far as not mentioning a motive, it looks like the prosecutor didn’t want to say much since it hasn’t been determined whether the teens will be prosecuted as adults, so I’ll give the reporters a pass on that.
I think the problem is that we have no idea what sport is being discussed.
Say again?
I still have no idea what word was meant in this article:
Embellished? Embossed?
Emblazoned?
Embroiled? Embalmed? Embolistically emollient? Embraced by an embarrassment of embargoes?
Not to mention that 35-12 doesn’t sound “keenly fought” at all.
Meanwhile, the one-sentence paragraphs in the article linked by the OP are a bit annoying.
You’d never catch me doing anything like that.