Reflection on Text

Our third lecture for Introduction to Journalism and Communication covered text in the field of journalism. Sky or Skye, one of those two names, guest lectured on the topic. She spent fifty minutes educating all of us about such things as 'the inverted pyramid', 'hypertext', text within digital platforms and just how fundamentally essential it is to the journalism industry with the rise of social media. But you already know that don't you? You're reading this just to see how other people in your course are handling their blogs. I don't need to explain to you something that you can just go and watch on Blackboard. So I'm going to give you my opinion on the lecture and text as it relates to journalism.

It's pretty apparent just how important text is to communication. It's unavoidable in journalism. I don't think I can add any more to what was covered in the lecture. Now I'm forced to write a blog post reflecting on the incredibly ambiguous idea of 'text'. I'm supposed to reflect on these lectures about what I learnt. I didn't learn that much though.

Sky (or Skye) just gave me new terminology for the ideas I already had. You would think that using important information in the headline to catch the reader's eye would be a straightforward concept.Most of the lecture slides were just examples of news stories with Sky (or Skye) explaining just how much effort is put into headlines, captions, straps, leads, excerpts and other attention grabbing combinations of text. The latter half of the lecture was just a lesson on blogging and getting your posts into the search engines. For someone who has little experiencing writing and reading content online, this lecture would have been helpful. However, I took very little away from our third week lecture.

Goals and Stuff

I just checked an email about this Journalism course and apparently I have to write a blog post about every lecture. I thought I would simply be even more retrospective and write about my first lecture in JOUR1111. It was what most people would assume the first lecture of an introductory university course would be like. Bruce Redman, our lecturer, introduced himself and explained how the course would run, went over our assessment, answered our questions and tried as best he could to get us excited about journalism. He said a very quotable phrase which I'm sure he's been using for a while, "you are the journalist". I would be lying if I said it motivated me in the slightest but it did remind me that I should probably explain right here what I want to accomplish with this blog.

Journalism to me is simply a way to involve myself in my hobbies and interests and still have a job at the end of the day. I have almost no interest in politics, world news, sports and celebrities but that doesn't mean that I can't be a journalist. I'd much rather read about Pokemon, League of Legends, The Walking Dead or the Dark Knight Rises more than anything else.

So fucking awesome

Most of my days entail playing videogames, watching film and reading, watching and listening to videogame and film news. I check websites, watch reviews, listen to podcasts and have very heated discussions  with friends about geeky things. I have spent the last three days at a friend's new place watching Community while playing Magic: The Gathering because they had no internet and we all had a cold.

Imagine this but with better looking people.

I also like to think I can form sentences pretty well, so I'm essentially trying to combine the two things in the hopes I will actually be content some day.

I'm hoping that this degree will get my metaphorical foot into the metaphorical door of creative industries. If everything goes according to plan in a few years time I'd be writing for a videogame news or a film review website. If not, then I'm probably going to pick up some skills which could be applied to an array of jobs. I'm essentially hoping that journalism will point me in the direction that I want to go. So expect posts about things like how fucking incredible Bioshock Infinite is going to be.

The Internet and I

For my Introduction to Journalism and Communication course I have to maintain a blog. It's a place where I reflect on my lectures and tutorials as a minimum. I have attempted blogs before but I've always gotten bored with them too quickly. Hopefully the fact that this blog is where all my assessment for the course will be submitted will motivate me to actually write regularly and well.

It's actually already been a few weeks into this course so it looks like I've got some catching up to do. I thought I would start of this semester long party of a blog by reflecting on the internet and it's relation to journalism and communication. In the second week of this semester during my JOUR1111 lecture the topic of Web 2.0 and other web iterations was brought up and discussed with an understanding of what is the internet.

It's too well known just how interconnected human beings are today. Every single day I hear a new mind blowing statistic about just how many facebook users there are or how many years of videos on youtube are being watched every day. Everyone is connected  and it's actually scary just how well the internet can organise itself against someone or something. A few examples are when 4chan rallied an operation against Rebecca Black, recently Anonymous declared a war on religion, and the social media campaign against KONY recently became the most viral video of all time. The largest recent organised protest online was definitely the blackout to campaign against two pieces of legislation, SOPA and PIPA that was threatening to integral structure of how online content was produced. Reddit was at the forefront of the campaign and spearheaded the blackout.

I don't need to explain that the internet has completely changed how we interact with one another. I'm one of those people who uses the internet for almost everything. I primarily use facebook and reddit to entertain and educate myself but I also dabble in 4chan, tumblr, youtube, twitter, wikipedia, rss feeds, podcasts and many other websites. I use Skype to talk to my friends every day in addition to texting and instant messaging on facebook. In fact, Skype is the reason I have most of my best friends today.  I play lots of online games on both my Macbook Pro and my PS3. If I can I will usually try eBay, Amazon or Etsy before going outside and looking for something I want. Basically everything that I do to entertain and improve myself is dependant on a wifi connection. I haven't sat down and watched a television show in almost a year and I cannot remember ever reading a newspaper. I'm not really a big fan of current event news anyway. r/gaming, r/worldnews and r/technology keeps me up to date with everything that would possibly be important to me. Most of the news I read is niche and is related to videogames, movies, television and music. I cannot live without being entertained. In fact the only reason I'm actually writing this right now is because the internet is of something that is of interest to me. It can be really difficult for me to get motivated sometimes.

So how does this relate to Journalism? I actually believe that trained journalism is becoming redundant. It's so easy these days to set up a blog or a website that there's an over saturation of news. Things trend faster on twitter than they can get it onto the 6 o'clock news. The lecturer mentioned something known as a 'citizen journalist' which I believe is evolving the way news is spread. These days people can tweet, post and live stream events as they're occurring and everybody in the first world can have access to the technology to do so. If general people of the public took it upon themselves to go and research and investigate anything, they have the resources to get the story out there immediately.  As long as the internet is accessible, information will be available, discussion will be possible and news will spread.