Okay, I know what your thinking. ( Thats if anyone is reading this ) Why is she writing about our week 3 lecture when we are in week 6? Well I will
answer your question in the form of another question… Where do you serial and
punctual bloggers get the time to sit down and type about the lecture you just
sat in? Maybe I just need to get a grip on my time management and perhaps spend
less time doing things that are much more riveting…
Anyway! Week 3 lecture oh wow
what an eye opener. Just to mix things up a little we had a guest lecturer, Skye
Doherty. Before working in UQ’s School of Journalism & Communication Skye
worked on Fleet Street in the UK, dabbled in foreign correspondence and has
done lots of local work around Brisbane as a journalist. As you can tell from the heading, her forte
is text. This was made clear to me when her first words were “I like text, text
is great”. It was then that she went on to introduce us to the big scary world
of text. Text is many things, it’s fast, flexible, controllable, portable and
we can mold it to do what it is exactly that we want. It was then that the good old “Inverted
Triangle” flashed up on the screen. We all know what this is; we had it taught
to us by our year 5 teachers when we had to write a recount of our weekend (oh
they were the days). But just to refresh your memories here it is AGAIN
After giving a brief overview of
the inverted triangle, Skye talked about news values. News values define your
job as a journalist, Skye informed us budding journalists to learn them, and
suck them into our souls. An example from ‘The Sun” online newspaper was shown
to demonstrate a practical example of how the inverted pyramid and news values
work together. Then hyper text was explained, hypertext is when you see a news
story online with words and a picture, and on the side there are all other
links you can click to explore different angles of the story. Skye then went on
to explain the layouts of stories on front pages of newspapers. This then lead
to how to write a headline, which Skye explained was a very fine art that took
years to perfect. What makes a good headline? Always use a verb, make sure they
are true and correct and in the early stages of headline writing stay away from
puns. Skye also talked about lots of other text related things, with a focus
on how the social media revolution impacts textual journalism.
It was inspiring to hear Skye’s
career path, knowing that she was once to a novice and aspiring journalism
student. It excited me that she worked in Thailand and England alternating
between freelance work and foreign correspondence. It was then question time and a few people
were intrigued on her view on the whole news of the world scandal. Skye said
everyone knew what the News of the World journalists were doing, it was only when
the parents of missing child Maddie McCann phones were hacked that it came into
the public spotlight igniting rumors and outrage over phone hacking scandals.
Overall I found this lecture to be quite informative and somewhat inspiring,
it’s always good to hear from someone who has done something along the lines of
the career path you have in mind. So voila, theres week 3's lecture, better late then never !
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