Jour1111 Lecture 3

On the way home from Ms. Doherty's lecture, I picked up a Sydney Morning Herald to check out the information pyramid; nearly every article had the same structure, important stuff → General info →Fluff. I wondered; If you remove the fluff part of the article would it withdraw some of the colour or positioning intended by the writer and help the reader to make a critical evaluation of the information present, based on his or her own reaon? Just a thought.

I never really intended to involve myself in print media but the option is becoming more and more enticing as the opportunity slips further and further away with the regressive state of newspaper business. The idea of pure text story is appealing to me as I'm a horrible photographer and video-maker-guy. However, the current employment opportunities seem grim at best and newspapers are crammed with so much fluff the chances of writing about the botanical gardens new flower installation seems fairly high. 

The visual advertisments on web papers and even print papers never really struck me, I often glaze over the pages until I find something worth reading, but again picking up the SMH it is apparent that your eye is drawn to the large colour banner at the top initially, though this very rarely influences the stories I view, most I simply skip.

The other appeasing element of newspaper journalism is its apparent freedom of expression, especially in democracies such as ours. The SMH gave the devious Mr Abbot quite a wrap about his parliamentary misbehaviour and an extract from The New York Times likened Mitt Romneys running partener Paul Ryan to the leader of a lynch mob. This assures me that expression is still generally free amongst print media (though Heir Murdoch likes a good spin in our Aussie papers).

I wonder if Julian Assange would be taking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy if Wikileaks had have been a book......