l Text & Its Features
Within Oxford dictionary, the definition of text is simply “something written, typed, or printed”. However, according to Ms Doherty, the magic of news text is much more than that.
Ÿ Fast-people can create text fast, and especially with the new media, the process of typing and sending out texts has accelerated.
Ÿ Flexible-journalists can shape the text at exactly the way they by modifying the words. They can have relatively complete and easier control over the text when comparing to audio or video production that contains more limitation as the material for editing is set.
Ÿ Portable-all you need is pen and paper, when in extreme conditions such as a dessert and there is no place for you to recharge the electronic devices are used to produce audio or visual context, text can still be recorded.
Ÿ Searchable and dominant the online space- as the search engine can only search words, text is the main communicative device you can use in an online environment.
Ÿ Construction of News text-generally includes headlines, standfirst, body copy, caption, pull quotes, break and boxes, link etc.
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l Text in Newspaper
Ms Doherty told us that generally, the elements that dominant the newspaper page are the main headlines and images. According to the research of poynter eyetrack, when people read newspaper, the first that get their attention is the image. Then, after their eye are on the newspaper, the title need to be catchy in order to encourage the readers to continue reading. Hence, within the typesetting of the newspaper page, the main headlines and the image will be inset first, than the rest of the content will be built around them. From my experience, I agree with Ms Doherty’s point of view of that people would get attracted by the images before the text on the newspaper as I am like that as well. I think this is because with images, we are enabled to identify what it is straight away as we link the image to our general understanding of the world. For example, if we saw an image of a man with gun, we can recognize that a gun represents danger as we link it to our general understandings about gun. Hence we would be able to have a sense of what is the story might be like without even reading the text. On the other hand, as reading text is a learned skill, which is a human invention but not a biological endowment like identifying things visually, I think we tend to response to text slower than we do as we see an image. For example, as I am not good at English, if there is a big word in the headline, I wouldn’t know what the story is about. Nonetheless, I do agree with that headlines are part of the essential element within news as it can give the audience the entire landscape of the story in just a few words.
Moreover, there would be limited space and characters for each story because the size of the page is set. Under such condition, the words in the standfirst and the headline cannot be repeated. I think this may because of that under a word limit condition, in order to get a fuller picture of the story for the reader that catches their attention, journalist may tend to put as many information as possible into the headlines and standfirst.
Furthermore, the way that stories are organized on a news page is according to the format of inverted pyramid in most of the western world. Inverted pyramid is a way of organizing information in the order of importance in terms of news value; so the most important stories goes on the top, and the least important ones goes at the bottom. Ms Doherty accounted that it is a very effective way of organizing information, because the news text can be chopped at any point and people can still get the most important stuff. In addition, it focuses on facts, so it facilitates objectivity in the reporting, and as Ms Doherty suggested, “it is a very good technique to master very early.” Nonetheless, Ms Doherty also mention that such organization of ‘importance’ reveals what is the thing that the news media think is important and that the general public ought to know. In a way, it reflects the dominant value within the society to the readers. For example, generally, politics news or entertaining news would be placed on top of the new page whereas information about art is often placed at the bottom. As a result, it reflects that social events are valued more relatively.
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l Text for Online News
One of the greatest different between traditional print news and online news is that it provides hypertext is enabled to created in the new media environment of facebook, tweeter, email, blogger, email, forum and comment. It is a digital context that enabled itself to be searchable by the internet and can have multiple links and multimedia context attach within it. Additionally, in channels such as facebook, people can post comment underneath the news immediately after it’s out and involve in the producing of the content.
Moreover, Ms Doherty characterized hypertext as a “construction has nothing to do with print”. This is because hypertext is a unique form of itself as it is significantly different from print in terms of its multi-functional context and its text need to catered the information demand of the mechanic system instead of just purely writing for the reader. The three main things that is involved on this aspect is: metadata, excerpt and tag, is to help the web news to be searchable by the search engine in the online environment. Firstly, metadata is the key word that is attached to the news. It is important for the key word to be appropriate, as being something that people would seemingly to put in the search engine. Also, such key word needs to be appeared in the headline or the excerpt (standfirst). Consequently, the online news can come up on the list when people are googling the key word. However, it does have the down side of declining the strength of the headline as freedom of wording is restricted for specific key word to be applied. Moreover, excerpt is equivalent to standfirst, but the difference between them is that excerpt gets distributed and sends to people via internet. Moreover, tags are used to enabled the search engine to track the context as well, this is extremely useful to tag the images that you posted on online web as search engine only identifies words, the only way for the image to be searchable is to be tagged. Furthermore, the links that are embedded in hypertext shall be linked to reputational sources and be unbroken is crucial to the quality of the news context. Additionally, the originality of the text need to be ensured in order to avoid the news text to be filtered out by the search engine due to repetition. As a result, the main point about the online news is that though has a higher interactivity and hypertext can provide a richer context and it needs to be search engine and searcher friendly in order for it to be widely distributed.
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l Is Journalism industry on top of online text yet?
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According to Ms Doherty, Journalism has not yet exploited hypertext, multimedia or interactivity. Also, its usage of links is limited.
l Often restricted to content on the same site
l Less linking to primary source
l Results in lack of depth and limited view
Ms Doherty argues that there is so much potential for the development of journalism can explore the unique platform that the internet offered. I do agree with her point of view, but at the same time I think some limitation about the links may be caused by the intention of controlling the news distribution in order to serve the interest of the media institution. Firstly, I think the cause for restriction to the same site may be caused by the media institution wants the audience to consume more news products that the same media institution provides. Thus, the media institution may continue to persuade the audience to a certain point of view that serves the interest of the media institutions as all the news you get gives the same perspective. I think this is the way that newspaper may have always been, and they just now applied it to the web context as well. Even though what general journalists and the audience want is just knowledge of the world, at the end of the day, as media can shape people’s thought and thus behavior, it may be subjected as an influencing and controlling device by the power.
l Extra Materials
Tips on how to write for news/ press:
How To Write A Successful Press Release – PRWeb
How to Write News Stories
How to Write a Press Release
Wikihow-How to Write a Press Release
How to Write News Releases that Sell.
Writing Great Online News Releases
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