Lecture 3 Reflection – What is text?

Today we were lucky enough to have guest lecturer Skye Doherty talk to us about TEXT.  She talked about the inverted pyramid, which we are also covering in JOUR1112 at the moment.  The inverted pyramid and ‘WWWWW&H’ are both very simple yet helpful guides for how to structure a news story.  I found this example of the inverted pyramid and thought it very relevant to what Skye was talking about. 

Skye went on to discuss news values, which works in conjunction with the inverted pyramid.  I think I will be using these two concepts throughout my entire journalism career.  Skye brought to our attention to how different online news can be formatted, and how hyper text can allow readers to explore more easily and to do things they cannot do with basic print.  She went through the basic structure of a print newspaper and compared it to how different the same newspaper can appear online.  I found Skyes advice on headlines the most helpful advice out of todays lecture; make sure headlines contain a verb, that they are true and correct.  It is important is keep headlines simple so they are easy to search online.