Lecture 3: Text

Week Three’s lecture revolved around ‘text’, hosted by print journalist Skye Doherty. Thinking about text and journalism together seems upfront right? Well apparently not. I have a vague recollection that at some point in my schooling we looked at journalism and newspapers, I have a feeling it was primary school as all I remember was being told an article in a newspaper had to have a headline, the authors name and the story. Of course, before Skye’s lecture I know the ‘authors name’ part of an article is called the by-line and all those other things you somehow just learn as you get older. I knew the news was ever expanding, but I did not understand the various processes that go into producing a story that will be able to cross all the new ways of accessing newspaper articles.

The basic techniques outlined were Poynter eye track, where in print journalism a picture is more likely to draw in a reader compared to online journalism in which it is the text that appeals to the reader. Skye also covered the inverted triangle in relation to how a story should be written, with the most important aspects at the beginning and slowly filtering down to the ‘fluff’ at the end. Although these were both new to me, they were not eye opening; it is merely a matter of common sense, to an extent. It was the concept of creating a layout that can be transferred with ease to all different kinds of mediums that made me realise just how much more effort and thought process must be required now than 20 years ago in this field. Not only is a different layout required for print journalism in newspapers and online news, but different layouts for smart phones, tablets and social media.

The most important part of this lecture for me was about hypertext. Skye quoted Ted Nelson who defined hypertext as “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented of represent on paper” or now the internet. The reason why this was my favourite part was the interesting point made that journalism has not yet exploited hypertext or multimedia and interactivity. The idea that there is so much that could be done through this is astounding. Skye identified through hypertext various articles could link to primary source, thus giving them more depth. She also raised the point that instead of just adjusting print to digital; shouldn’t we be asking what else could digital media offer us?

Vogue Australia magazine cover, left , Vogue Australia homepage, right