TEXT - LECTURE 3

The lecture in week 3 provided insight on what text really is other than a bunch of symbols creating stories. Skye Doherty, a professional in production journalism came and explained that text is

• fast
• flexible
• complete control
• portable 
• searchable
• dominates online

Doherty educated that the presentation of the text is vital for the article to be effective and obviously must hold story content. Furthermore the text requires headlines, stand-first, captions, pull quotes, breakout boxes and links to capture the readers attention. The first paragraph requires the '5 W's and 1 H', and the rest of the text will elaborate and provide more detail. This is where the inverted pyramid originates from, therefore being the most important at the beginning of the article to the least important concluding the text.

Dominant headlines often draw the eye first and with poynter eye-tracking research it has shown that readers will look to the upper left side of the paper first. Now after hearing this, I noticed this is the case of all newspapers, magazines and even blogs.

 The way the headline is worded is also a vital element in catching the readers attention, Skye lectured us that the writers of the article are evidently a main factor of writing the story ( Duhhh Sam) but the writers of the headline are the ones that pull the attention. 

There is also a shift, with the arrival of news websites, on the traditional method of structuring articles. With now news having metadata, tags, keywords, links and hypertext it has given readers a simple and easy method of finding the article they want to read with a matter of few clicks. However text is confined to news it is also emails, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, comments and forums.

Text is everywhere and is vastly changing with technology. 

Sam :)