Lecture Three

Lecture three was taken by Ms. Skye Doherty. As an editor, digital producer and media consultant with more than 10 years' journalism experience, she has worked for media groups in Australia, South-East Asia and the UK. Her lecture centred around the idea of 'text'. She saw text, on the grounds of journalism, as story content, headlines, standfirst, captions, pull quotes, break-out boxes, links, emails, blogs, tweets, posts and updates from social networking sites such as Facebook, comments, forums, metadata, excerpts and tags.

Text is the skeleton of good journalism. As Skye said, "being able to control and craft the medium of text is vital in journalism and publishing". Basically, without text, journalism could not function. In fact, its fundamental importance to the field is only growing.

As we enter Web 3.0, where the internet is relied upon more and more, we see the 'searchability' of text to be the only way one can quickly navigate to the specific article they want to read. Thus, text in the form of links, keywords etc. are vital in the survival of online journalism.

Part of the power of text lies in the fact that it is fast, flexible, controllable, portable and searchable. It dominates.

Skye also covered some of the technicalities of journalistic writing. Introducing the idea of the 'inverted pyramid'. I first came across this particular model, however, in my reading of "Convergent Journalism" prior to this lecture. This is how they put it:

"For what seems like an interminable number of years, writes, editors, and educators have been sounding the death knell of the inverted pyramid. It's been called boring, among other things, and yet for some reason, trend after trend in journalism has been unable to unseat it. The immediacy-based approach to journalism that the Web requires seems to have resuscitated the inverted pyramid" (pg.43)

Basically, it visualises the age-old technique of putting the most important information towards the top of the written piece, and the least important towards the bottom. Keeping in mind that the least important is not unimportant.

My love of writing made this lecture very interesting for me. Knowing that words were, are, and will always be, the foundation stone of journalism is reassuring. Writing is not only vital in regards to print journalism, but is equally as important, if not more so, in the realm of online journalism.