Lecture 3: Text Time

Text, possibly the most vital part of journalism, obviously. But there are more dimensions to text than you would think. You always know when something is important when they bring in someone else to talk about it. So this week it was guest lecturer Skye Doherty’s responsibility to give up some pretty vital notes.

So, text…I guess, maybe just for me, but this seemed like our first lesson on ‘being a journalist’. A tips of the trade kind of lesson. How to write; what we write; and how many times we have to write the one thing; sort of freaks me out a little. I am still struggling to think of a name for my blog and headlines for each of my entries and now I am told I will have to be writing more than one per article.  I guess it is something I will learn to develop, in time.

Inverted Pyramid?

Writing the actual article seems to be a bit easier though. Having a structure to write with always seems to help (structure  is the thing I am struggling the most with in these blogs). But thanks to the inverted pyramid it all starts to seem a bit easier. Who, what, when, where and why comes first, the most important stuff, and then the less important information slowly follows. Makes sense.

And then the lectures start to blend together. Web 2.0, the news on the web, with its hyperlinks and tags, with blogs and vlogs (video blogs) all bring a new aspect to the news and give a whole new meaning to the word text.  While it can all be a bit confusing it is really quite amazing that with simply typing a few words I can open the doors into thousands of articles of news.

The world is moving at a fast pace, but whether it comes from a one hundred year old newspaper or the wonders of the internet, text is at the source of every news story and it is hard to see it ever changing.

Till Text Time…