Lecture 3 (12/03/2012) "Text"

This week, our lecture was run by Skye Doherty, a very experienced journalist who has worked all over the world. I found her lecture very interesting and you could tell she had a great deal of knowledge. I would have loved to talk to her personally about her experiences and what she did to become so successful.

Skye said that text is:
- Fast
- Flexible
- Complete control
- Dominates online
- Searchable

She also said that evaluating texts' success is done in an inverted pyramid, in other words an upside down triangle; the top of the triangle being the most important text, and the bottom being the least.

For example, in a newspaper article, the headline is almost always in a bigger font and in a bold font, comparing to the actual text of the article in a smaller font. This is an example of text's inverted pyramid in use, the more 'important' text being bolder and more noticeable than the smaller text.

Examples of 'text': story content, headlines, standfirst, break-out boxes, pull quotes, captions, links...

But also: E-mails, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, comments, forums...

"Bloggers' use of and engagement with various social media tools is expanding and the lines between blogs, micro blogs and social networks are disappearing."

Skye also talked about hypertext. Hypertext is defined as text with references (or hyperlinks) to other text that is readily available to the reader. Hypertext is fundamental to the foundations of the Internet, and is a great way to focus readers attention on to 'related stories' to the one that they are reading. I couldn't help but think about Web 3.0 (Bruce Redman's "New News" lecture) and how hypertext is often tailored to the interests of the reader. For example, I was just browsing on Facebook the other day in my spare time, and noticed a group of ads to the right of the webpage with images of cats and shoes, two things I had talked about in a post a few days earlier. There was even an advertisement there including a word I use often as a joke in posts! It's quite amazing how the web is becoming more and more catered to the producer than we think.

Poynter eyetrack: The reader's attention is drawn to the most dominant headlines - especially top left or most often (but not always) top right. Skye also said that contrary to popular belief, photographs aren't always the thing that catches our eye the most when entering a webpage or reading a newspaper. I found that fascinating. It seems that text is most definitely dominating our webpages and newspapers. Good for journalists I guess!

Skye also talked about 'tagging.' Tagging makes articles, blogs and journals more accessible, as when a reader types one of the tags appearing in a text, the text will appear more readily in search engines such as Google. In fact, underneath this blog as I am typing, I have the option of tagging this blog with a few keywords to make it more accessible. Not a bad idea at all.