Making your words work

"Text is fundamental and very important online" - Skye Doherty.

Lecture three brought us guest speaker Skye Doherty. She was from the School of Journalism and Communication and had some impressive journalism history on her hands. She had worked with Rupert Murdoch, also on Fleet Street in the UK during the News of the World scandal, worked as a foreign correspondence and worked for local newspapers in such areas as Proserpine and Mackay. It was safe to say, she knew her stuff when it came to text journalism!
She opened up my mind a lot in her speech. Text journalism was no longer just simply an article in the local newspaper, there was so much more to it. Text journalism is story content, it's headlines and standfirst, as well as captions, pull quotes, break-out boxes and links. Emails, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, comments and forums, metadata, excerpts and tags all fall in this 'text' bracket.
Text encapsulated hyperlinks, tagging, visual aids, and so much more. Text was a flourishing medium taking over the web in all its glory!

This screen shot shows a text article online. It shows elements of an online text article that was outlined by Skye in her lecture. The article has hypertexts and links, allows for commenting, includes a visual aid, a headline and standfirst, quotes and pull quotes.
Skye also mentioned 'The Inverted Pyramid of Journalism'. Basically saying the most important information is first, with the last parts of information being able to be cut without losing focus of the story. It looks like this:

Upon finishing this lecture, I reviewed the information covered and I noticed the importance put on online news text sources rather than print news text sources. To be fair, Skye did mention The Australian on two accounts, however she spoke primarily of text being online. Understandably, you cannot include hypertext, tagging, immediate commenting, metadata or excerpts in a print sources - but a print source is still very much a form of text journalism. I believe this lecture further enforced that online is taking over print. Online ultimately is allowing for a greater degree of availability and depth (in some cases).
In summary, today I learnt that text is all about making your words work. This could be through print or online.
12.03.2012