If you haven't already guessed, this week's lecture was all about text. We underestimate the power that text has. It can make or break us.
We had a guest speaker, Skye, who was another very passionate person about journalism. She began by teaching us what text is, whilst this might seem like common sense, she taught us that it is so much more then what we think it is.
To me the thing that stuck into my head long after the lecture had finished was this...
Our media, is dedicated to power, sex, death, greed. This is after all what sells, this is what majority of the headlines are talking about. Now, I'm going to be honest, and say that I am much more inclined to read something about those things then about the local beauty queen or about the school who just got new uniforms. The drama draws us in, we are snoopy people, it is our nature to be curious about the latest scandals. We can't help it.
She continued to teach us about all the nitty gritty finer details about text, the stuff you would expect to hear from an experienced journalist. Headlines, story content, stand first, captions, pulls quotes, break-out boxes and links. These are all a major part of what text is. What our newspapers, magazines, web pages and so on are made of. We further discussed headlines and how it is so important for your target audience to have a good headline- I for one have already realised how hard it is to come up with a good headline!
But text is not just newspapers and magazines, things we don't even realise, Facebook, Twitter even Tumblr we are creating and publishing text which has the ability to be read by everyone. Text comes in all shapes and forms.
Now Skye asked if there were any questions... slowly but surely the hands began to rise. One girl had apparently read something Skye had written about gaming. Journalist gaming if I do recall. It was random and I had never heard of such a thing, but I got to experience it first hand. I can't remember exactly what the game was called but it was about current day events. It was learning, experiencing and playing a game all at the same time. It was very interesting and a very smart tactic at getting your message across. It just showed how journalism is way more than just what we have seen in the past, but it is reaching whole new and fascinating levels.
I wonder what will come next!
Goodbyeeeeeee :)
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