Lecture 3- text in Journalism

In Lecture 3 we learnt about text in Journalism. How it operates, is used for online/print Journalism and how they are different.

Special guest was Skye Doherty- Print Journalist.

Skye explained to us that text is fast, flexible, available for different platforms, portable, searchable and dominates online.

Digital platforms are visual, but what makes these platforms seachable, is text.

Organisation of text in Broadcast news- Inverted Pyramid. Originated in America. The inverted Pyramid format organises the improtant information first. Who, what, when, where, how and why. News values including conflict, control, power, money, sex drugs rock & roll. News values are included in this first paragraph. As the text/story develops, the background, specific and more information on what's actually  happened are stated.

Invertered news Pyramid is great for hard news reporting.

How we package and deliver news: studies have shown that people read from the top left. Thats where the biggest headline and stores are. News values are used to decide what goes where on the front page. Online, is not the same organisation. As online has meta-tags, links and branches to other stories included in stories.

Online news format- Healine, image, caption. The reader has the option to explore main story or alternatively, sub-stoies related. Ultimately, the reader has the power of choice.

Text is:
-story content
-Headlines
-captions
-links and more.

A 'Mast-Head' is name of newspaper, followed by the 'Folio' (date), 'Pointers' (Senior writers use a few words to get readers interested in the newspaper), followed by more Headlines, 'Pull' (main story), Pull quote/box text and more.

This lecture was very informative in regards to how text in news changes depending on the platform (TV/RADOI or ONLINE or PRINT). What I found most interesting was that the information presented to me by Skye I already knew, however she presented it in a new way. For example, I already understood that Online news stories have links included in the content, however I never compared it to  how Print news was presented (obviously with no links but with similar content).