Text in Journalism

This week's lecture was given by one Skye Doherty and talked about the importance of text in modern Journalism. The many different news platforms and online media places, gave me the impression that photos are the main way that news is spread to the masses. But this lecture reminded me that with text you have much more control over what and how you present your article. Even with the pictures we have online, they need to be supplemented with text to make them searchable, since text dominates online.

With news and journalism becoming increasingly online-dominated, the articles written for mass communication has to adjust many things, including layout. It now has the additional importance of hyperlinks (handy little links that interlink different sites and addresses to an article), searchable titles, and be adaptable to different layouts. In light of the importance of hyperlinks, I have chocked this post full of hyperlinks to (completely random) links. Let's see how this goes.

Another important technique she mentioned (more a fundamental FACT, than technique) is the inverted pyramid. Where the important what, why, when, how, where and who is described. This is very important so that readers can immediately be drawn into the story, otherwise they will get frustrated and bored and simply not read further.

This also relates to the new shiny "features" online news gives journalists to play with. Although, it seems like a lot of extra work. The articles written look different on the different platforms they are displayed on; Facebook, news sites, twitter, etc. Therefore it is so important to have a good, attention grabbing and search-friendly headline and good introductory paragraph.

Here is an example of the devastating earthquake that hit Indonesia on the 11 of April, as shown on the Brisbane Times website:

First when you access the main page to read the headlines, this is what is shown of the story:

Note how the headline is short and contains the most probable words to be searched, and the only sentence shown has all the important information that people would immediately want to know. Then when you click on that link, this is the next page shown:

This has a different picture again, and has a little bit more information, but still the main sentence that was used in the first page. Then there is a hyperlink to the full story which looks like this:

This finally gives the whole story. This layout works really well, because it gives people the immediate information and they can then go deeper into it for more information.

Basically, journalism and news is based on text. Headlines, captions, stand-firsts, content, blurbs. Even with the new online and picture "direction" it is moving in, text will always stay fundamental to news writing and so it is important for us to get as much of a grasp of being good writers as we can.