Txt Me.

Lecture 3 was a true indicator of UQ’s ability to source professionals. Skye Doherty, a professional in production journalism, came, conquered and imparted some serious knowledge about what text actually is. 

So, text is:

 Fast, Flexible,Text gives us complete control, Portable, Searchable, Dominates the realm of online.

But text can only be these things if we use it right.

Skye urged that the presentation of text is paramount to its efficiency, and  therefore text must, of course, have story content, but it also must have headlines that catch and lead the eye (Poynter Eye track), use of stand-firsts (text explaining the story/headline), picture captions and pull quotes.  It was your basic, "5 W’s and H go at the top, and the rest goes after" speech.  Although tedious to listen to again after years of practice, it did beg the question “How does this relate to the web?”

In a world dominated by Web.3.0, text extends beyond the printed page of a newspaper, to a world where text can be defined as metadata, tags, keywords, links and hypertext (the links under news articles etc. that offer similar stories, or extensions of your current story).  It is because of these elements that text needs to be search engine friendly - meaning the important information needs to be at the top and keyworded so people can see it. It’s very simple. However text isn't limited to articles online, email, Facebook comments, status updates and even this very blog are considered text, and can be sourced on a search engine, given you have used the right keywords, all the while keeping in mind the presentation of information varies across platforms. Essentially, everything relies on how users present their information, so that the results of a search are quick to sort and relevant.

Moving on. Skye, and her career, a career that honest to god makes my mouthwater, to me was the best part of the lecture. Instead of rattling off some rehearsed, jargon laden speech, she broke it all down for us and it was surprising to find how clear, well-spoken and concise she was in her teaching method - Usually I find guest speakers tend to over-compensate and this was certainly not the case with Skye.

Her story is realistic, which is what captured my attention. To get where she is today, she had to start at the bottom, and I mean the bottom bottom, beginning her career in places like Proserpine and, god bless her soul, Mackay. (This may not be a true reflection of Mackay’s ‘Daily Mercury’, I know for certain living in Mackay has made me bitter.)  However, she advanced, her career expanding to media outlets such as‘The Financial Times’ and ‘The Guardian.’ In all, she made a career in journalism seem very attainable.

As for “Cutthroat Capitalism”, an interactive and very entertaining Somali pirate game, an interesting discussion was roused as to whether these news based games were trivialising the issues they were based on.  In my opinion, maybe. However I think it’s safe to say that if someone has found a website to play a news game, they probably are well aware of the situation, or incredibly lost.

In all, I think we take, text for granted - all the nitty gritty of the internet just didn’t exist for us, the only thing we knew for CERTAIN was that Google was magic.

-Shannen