Thursday, 30 August 2012

WEEK 3


For today’s lecture a guest speaker, Skye Doherty, was brought in to inform us about the use of text in journalism. I found the talk at times engrossing and a little tedious.  The breakdown of ‘what is text’ segment was a little long-winded and patronising, however Skye’s facts on the methods newspapers use to attract the attention of readers was were interesting for me: apparently the most eye-catching area to place a story is in the left hand corner of a page, and then highlighting in bold and enlarging the font for further noticeability so it stands out above the other less important stories.

The lecture was also useful in learning some important keywords employed in everyday journalism, such as hyperlinks, hypertext, tags and metadata. It was also interesting to hear about how the advancing mediums (such as articles written for internet tablets) have an individual layout compared to the traditional newspaper articles; headlines need to be more direct and referential in order to come up in google searches, and articles in general have the added feature of links (or hyperlinks) to other articles on the news website that newspapers can’t deliver.

On the whole this lecture was an educational experience, and probably one of the most important of the semester. I will make sure come back to the recording of this lecture when I am writing my feature article in September!


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