Week 3 Lecture

We had Skye Doherty as our guest lecture on L3. Topic is TEXT. 

I learned that she is an editor, digital producer and media consultant. She focused on news journalism and how to take news to people.

Although this lecture's content is pretty straight forward,  to me, it is fruitful. I took away a lot of important stuff. How a journalist can excel without writing a great and influencing article? Or at least, a sentence that catches people’s interest. I always know how important text is in journalism because to build a career in this business, you have to be really good at it.  

First she told us how amazing text is because it is portable, controllable, can modify it anywhere and anytime. Also, a journalist must be aware of the news value. Then this 'Inverted Pyramid' theory that I'm getting familiar with came up again.

It’s important to know how to craft words. Although in publishing news, a photo does help a lot. By crafting the words may affect readers' view and change perspective of public towards a certain issues if your article is powerful enough. Text is significant in publishing. She said we have to be good in using vocabulary.

“Headline writing is an art.” She talked about how can an interesting headline captivates reader. It doesn’t need to have puns but it has to be true and correct. One of the biggest advantage on online media is you get to search articles by typing keywords into the search engine.

Tag your article with correct keywords and come out with a beautiful headline. Also, she spoke on how headline may changes according to the media. I'm following couple of news agencies on Twitter and also Facebook, if the headline isn't appealing, I'll just ignore it. 

I didn't realize there's difference between headline formats on these online media, from that day on, I paid attention to the same news on Facebook.

She also compared the difference of the articles of same issues on printed media and online media.As there's limited space on newspaper, the editor has to choose carefully which news to be published on main pages and also the size of the column whereas the unlimited space online allows to put any news on it. Online news is broad and has higher accessibility as they have these bullets that link to other related stories.

She showed an article from TheSun online and talked about how informative an article should be at the first paragraph to tell the whole story efficiently. Then gets into more detail in the rest of the article. Usually you get information of the 5 Wifes (Who, What When, Where and Why) and 1 Husband (How).

  

Honestly, after this lecture I felt more insecure than ever as I don't know how to play with words (or craft it), and shoot a captivating headline. Through blogging on my personal blog, I realize my weakness is to summarize the article and give it a beautiful title. Gotta work harder!