Skye's the Limit

Skye Doherty, our guest presenter for this lecture, discussed the inverted pyramid and the construct of news in different forms. While overall nothing really stood out to me as new, seeing as I’d read the course readings before the lecture, Skye did express some interesting ideas and facts.

Initially we discussed text and its domination in most forms of the media – including online. Of course, as Skye pointed out, there is an inherent difference between people who read articles online and those who use the “traditional” media texts. These differences, while still conforming to the inverted pyramid, ultimately lie within the content; with online having more links to other related articles and information about the news story. Interestingly, I would have thought that pages with more links would lose the time that readers spend on their page, however, Skye pointed out the contrary….. If only I had related content to link to my blog!

Inverted Pyramid Structure

We further discussed how text rules the computer screen, and not the picture of the article which everyone seems to think is the most important part. It is, in fact, the headline which draws people in to read the article – but of course on a web where the power is placed upon the tagged words, they can’t be the clever puns and pop-culture references the newspapers and magazines are so fond of!

Underlying all this info was of course the link back to the course. Online it’s all about broadcasting to the greatest audience – include the keywords, links, metadata, content in your media articles/posts and you’ll get the audience, or at least a lot of traffic through your site!

While all the lecture content was pretty straight forward, the most interesting part would have been the question time at the end where none other than News Of The World came into the limelight. To think how the course of media will change thanks to the issues brought to light in the phone hacking scandal is always interesting to discuss, especially when you’ve got someone in the field confined to the lecture room!