JOUR1111 Lecture 3

Text is the super power of journalism because it is the fastest, most flexible, most controllable form of media and it is literally everywhere!

The lecture on text opened my eyes to the intricacies of creating text journalism and the adaptability of text to a range of mediums. Most surprising of all was the Poynter eye tracking research that showed that text rules on the screen. I think back to the times when I have picked up a newspaper or magazine and the first thing that catches my eye are all the pretty pictures. So I did a bit of self experimentation, scanning articles all over the web, and of course the research proved to be true as the headline was typically the first thing that drew my attention.

But WHY?

The Poynter eye tracking research revealed that when reading a web page people’s gaze will often hover in the top left corner before moving from left to right and down the page. This makes sense considering that that we always read (and write) from left to right. Of course, headlines are strategically placed in the upper left corner so it is little wonder that it is the first thing we see!

Check out the results of the Poynter eye tracking study. It has some really interesting stuff for budding journalists! http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/24963/eyetrack-iii-what-news-websites-look-like-through-readers-eyes/

There are so many different ways to read news and text journalists need to be able to adapt their article to all forms. For example, there is print, computers, iPads and smart phones just to name a few. There are millions and millions of articles on the web so there is an art to publishing a digital story so that it can be found. As discussed in the lecture, the ability to make an article search-friendly comes down to metadata, tags and excerpts. In other words, a reader can type in a key word relating to the article in the search bar on the website and then a list of options will appear with the headline and a snippet of the story. For a digital story there are stricter limits on the creativity of the headline because it needs to be searchable.

For example, this is a fantastic newspaper headline about a soccer match however it simply would not work in a digital medium.

There is great potential for online text journalism to improve through the use of hypertext and links. It was discussed in the lecture that journalism has not exploited hypertext, multimedia and interactivity which could add so much more depth to online news. Links could be used to direct readers to primary sources and serve as an important part in creating a broader, more encompassing narrative.

The issue with print media is that the only information you can get is right there on the page. But online media can be so much more and by bouncing around from link to link you can get as close as humanly possible to the full story!
And isn’t that what we all want?

Sez! J