What We Have Learnt In The Lectures So Far.. Lecture 3!

Lecture 3 - What is Text?

Ello ello!
We are now into our third week of lectures and tutorials and this week, the class learnt mostly about what text is and how it is used in the media. This particular lecture was very informative and sometimes a little hard to absorb but I enjoyed it nonetheless. We first learnt that text is fast, flexible, has complete control, portable, searchable and dominates online. The inverted pyramid was next discussed and how it is organised from the least important to most important information and that the news value stories are at the top of the pyramid (eg sex, drugs and entertainment etc)

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·       Hypertext (links) takes the story into different directions altogether. Text is also organised into different segments such as story content headlines, standfirst, captions, pull quotes, break-out boxes and links. A Poynter eyetrack was defined as dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right. Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren’t typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen — both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.

·         When writing a news article, the organisation structure of this is: strap, nav head, head, head, long lead, short lead, images and story. Text is also: emails, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates etc. Next,"Bloggers” use of and engagement with various social media tools is expanding and the lines between blogs, micro-blogs and social networks are disappearing. Text also uses metadata, excerpts and tags and a post summary has two main uses: 

·         1. It replaces the full content in RSS feeds

·         2. Can be displayed in places where quick summaries are preferable to

·         full content.

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