Lecture Three

For this lecture we were lucky enough to have a guest speaker Ms. Skye Doherty, a print journalist, who has worked in regional Australia, South-East Asia and Europe and as such is very experienced in the field of Journalism, come talk to us.  Doherty’s talk focused on the notion of ‘text’ in the context of Journalism.

The advantageous, unique qualities of text include its ability to be fast, flexible, portable and searchable. In Doherty’s opinion, words can tell a story in a way sounds and visuals are unable to. I found this comment intriguing as I personally am a visual learner and find visuals sometimes the most profound, provoking stimulus of all (the work of Cartier Bresson comes particularly to mind). 

A visual representation of the "Inverted Pyramid"

Next, Doherty outlined some of the fundamental conventions of journalism. She talked about the concept of the “inverted pyramid” employed by journalists as a way of efficiently organising the information they wish to publish. This technique places at the top of a story the information which is considered to be most important, transgressively leading to the least important (but not unimportant) information at the bottom. Before attending this lecture or doing the assigned reading, I had never realised how important the layout of the text was in regards to how the reader interacts and responds to the text. There are many conventions, of which I had been unaware, that go into structuring a text both in print and online.

As Doherty poignantly stated in the lecture, “print is dying” and in its place hypertexts are steadily emerging. Some supporters of this change argue that hypertexts are remedial – they remedy the inherent faults associated with print. In the future, hyperlinks, tags, metadata and excerpts, could be used by journalists to give readers access to differing opinions and perspectives as well as links to primary sources, hence, adding to the depth of the story being told. In my humble opinion, I argue however, that though hypertexts do combat some of the issues brought about by printed texts, they also have their own issues and faults. Particularly, the online medium as described in the set reading, Convergent Journalism, “screams immediacy.” As such journalistic stories are expected to be written and posted within a very small time frame from when the incident actually occurred. This means unfortunately that a lot of the work being posted online is not being researched or edited effectively and thus the accuracy of some of the work available over the Internet is questionable. Moreover, as Doherty herself proclaimed, “writing is a craft” and though anyone can type not everyone can write.