Lecture 3

Lecture 3 in Jour1111 was all about storytelling through text as examined by guest lecturer Skye Doherty. Something as simple as text, is taken very much for granted. In fact there is a lot to organising a page full of text. There are headlines, captions, stand firsts, body copies and links to consider. It is much more creative then I ever realised! Writers need to consider the space and font size they have to work with and create a captivating story within those confines, a very hard task I imagine! I particularly enjoyed the little interesting facts such as; the top left hand corner attracts the most attention attention and therefore the most dominant stories go there, never use a word in the stand first that you used in the headline and you should always use a verb in the headline.

To make things that little bit more difficult, text online is a step up. Unlike newspapers, text draws in more readers online than pictures do. Links in online journalism also play a very important role. Links need to be able to grab audience's attention is 4 or 5 words, convincing them to click and read on. An interesting concept was the way in which online journalism does not take advantage of links and hypertext. Instead of linking readers to primary sources or a carry on story they link only to other stories within the same website. This narrows peoples perception and knowledge of events and stories, a sad and selfish dilemma. The traditional theory is the text is read from top left to bottom right but this goes out the door once we're online and creates a multitude of new ways that text can be presented.

By the end of the lecture I appreciated text that whole lot more. It's everywhere, reading is a reflex that we can't turn off and therefore what we read and how we read it is very interesting and very important.