Read Only

You guys remember newspapers, right? You know those book things with words, a picture here and there. Well, they’re still going. Hard to believe I know.

Getting to the point at hand, print journalism is still a thriving industry. And contrary to popular belief, print doesn’t just mean words printed on paper. Online news can still be classified as print media as it is using words to get the point across.

We got a break from Brucey to learn about print journalism/media from Skye Doherty. Skye has had a pretty awesome career in print journalism working around the world as a freelancer and as part of some of the largest publications of Fleet Street. Learning from the best really.

The first things you could say about text is that it’s:

• ·         Fast
• ·         Flexible
• ·         Portable
• ·         Searchable
• ·         Dominates online

Being technologically illiterate (it’s amazing that I’ve figured out how to use this blog at all) the prevalence and importance of print media makes me quite happy. It’s because I’m quite fond of writing and using language in print rather than presenting visually or aurally.

But beyond our basic ideas, Skye also said that text is:

• ·         Story content
• ·         Headlines
• ·         Standfirst
• ·         Captions

Text seems to go beyond bulky sentences and paragraphs. Text is the effective use of written language. Headlines, by-lines and what have you are the simplest statements with the most meaning and power to draw people in. Writing headlines is almost an art form (to quote Skye on that one), because such a short statement must: have a verb, be true and be simple unless you can think of something witty (which you REALLY SHOULDN’T do unless you are quite witty).

Text does seem like a really simple media but it’s actually evolving. Social media and Web 2.0 have meant that things such as emails, blogs, tweets, Facebook, comments and forums count as text. Whether or not this is a good thing, I don’t know. Counting them as text shows that this is a dynamic and exciting medium. On the other hand, it seems to take away the focus on traditional print media which I love oh so much.

And text can also be interactive, which is a pretty strange notion. Posting links to create hypertext and take the reader to multiple facets of a story is making people more interested in news. Never in the history of print journalism has the reader been able to follow related and supplementary information until recently (see what I did there?).

Print journalism is alive and well and that definitely makes me happy. I'll leave it here because I'm purposely leaving out images from this post because I'm talking explicitly about text and I know that a big block of text isn't that fun to read ;-) (I'm so bloody clever)