Week 3 Lecture - Text

Lecture 3 Reflection:

So this week we had a guest lecturer, accomplished journalist Skye Doherty come in to talk to us about the power of text. Because I do not attend any of the actual lectures I was only able to hear her voice on the lecture recordings that Friday and here is what I feel I have learnt from her.

First of all, I began to see text in a whole new light. To see it more like a weapon, or a tool that can be used to produce something in whatever way you desire. For a journalist, this ability to structure text in a way that people will want to read it, is vital. If we can't do that, then ultimately, we suck. I have previously posted my reflections after reading about the inverted pyramid in our weekly reading task and Skye went over this in the lecture. These were my notes on how she structured it:

At the Top: Who, what, where, when, how, why – it should also appeal to news values such as conflict, international relations, death, power

In the middle: Develop ideas and add background

The bottom: Detail about what's happened

News is also structured differently depending on where it is being read eg. newspapers are structured differently to online news. Online we have the use of hypertexts that allow readers freedom to visit related news, or certain aspects that interest them and this format is very much the direction news is taking. As modern journalists we must therefore market our stories in a flexible way so that no matter what mode they are published in they will be appealing.

Some overall tips I took from Skye:

• Use words efficiently to tell the storyteller
• There is a lot of teamwork involved in journalism
• What makes a person read your story: Images, subtext, headlines of varying lengths, short lead, strap, navigation headlines
• Getting it out there: tags, excerpts, metadata for search engines, keywords

Thanks Skye for coming along and talking to us!

I would also just like to quickly apologise if my blog appears a little scattered right now. I was a little confused as to how the whole blog thing worked (I think there were a few of us), so dates and so on are a little muddled up as I have added past lecture reflections.