W3 Lecture: Telling Factual Stories (Skye Doherty)

Sky Doherty is a digital publisher, producer, multimedia journalist and has over a decade of journalism experience. She gave us some interesting pondering points in the third lecture. Here's Skye Doherty’s Twitter- https://twitter.com/#!/skyedoherty . Skye also has a website that has extensive content on the future of journalism on the web and legacy media http://skyedoherty.com/.

News values are determined by what the public want to know, and what the owners of wherever the story appears want the audience to think and feel. News values in turn affect the inverted pyramid style (the most important information and stories come first).

Print and online news media differ mainly in structure. Newspapers read most important from left to right, top to bottom (the way English speakers read a page). Whereas, important stories online are just there. The less important content is hyperlinked or under other links, which is a contrastingly non-linear structure. The hypertext aggregates the aspects of stories, making it easier to explore linearly. Interestingly, in both print and online news, people rarely read to the end--that is why it is so essential that the most important details appear first.

I noticed two main differences in online and print news aside from what Skye spoke about.The mast head and headlines were smaller, and the images bigger in online news stories.What's the significance of this? I thought it reflected the attitude of people quickly browsing the internet- as pictures with their colours really stand out and quickly present situations in a way that words in headlines, however brief, rarely can. Or maybe people just prefer to look at the pictures? A picture tells a thousand stories.

The big headlines in the printed paper draw people in. If so, why is it any different for web news? I think it's because people are also drawn in to the article through links, tags, labels etc. appearing elsewhere that lead back to the story-which would all lessen the need for the headline to draw so much attention. All headlines need to be true and must have a verb. Headlines online should be concise and contain pertinent search words to make them easier to find. URLs should be meaningful for clarity i.e. the headline of the story.

Skye also gave as a rundown of how the phone hacking scandal with News of the World will affect newspaper journalism. The journalism industry in the UK is rather different to the one in Australia, as there isn’t much competition in ours. A really thought provoking point made by Skye: investigative journalists break the law. But if you do break the law for journalism you should document why you are breaking it and ‘be your own moral compass’.

Another quote I liked: “The Press are crucial to a functioning Democracy.”
What's that Uncle Rupert? You agree? OK then.

-Bon