Today we had Ross Hawkes in to give us our first of 3 lectures (classes?) all focused around journalism. As I mentioned in my ‘About Me’ post on the home page, a huge inspiration for me is Jack Howard and another being Mark Kermode, both being journalists in their own right. They are film journalists and having followed them for a few years now I have had an appreciation and a want to learn journalism, its was actually my first choice uni course to study for a while. Ross’ session was focused more on ‘real’ journalism, meaning the news rather then the type of journalism that I was specifically interested in, but it was still a very very enjoyable class.

It was an odd start to say the least, as the first half hour was dedicated to how journalism is mainly viewed as negative, untrustworthy and how traditional journalism is a dying breed. However, we then went into detail about what journalism is today, why its arguably so much more important now then it ever has been. With the ‘Fake News’ storm erupting in the states, reporting the truth is vital.

Ross then talked about how some of the most effective journalism he ever put into practise was all about giving a voice to the voiceless, representing those who cant represent themselves. A great example of this is the picture of the Syrian boy covered in ash and dirt from bombings going viral, it gave voice to the little people being so horribly affected by the war.

Structuring an article online has a lot more unspoken rules then I originally realised, id never noticed before that most online articles are written in one sentence paragraphs never more then about 25 words long, but after looking online for only 5 minutes proved this to be true. However the main focus of the second half of the session was build around the order of information that is featured in an article. What order you put the information in an article can make or break it. The typical rule is following the ‘Inverted Pyramid of Journalism’

I had a lot of fun with this session, learning about the structure of journalism and how it is still so relevant in todays ‘red button’ society I think will be so vital going forward. I’m very much interested to see where the rest of the journalism classes will take us.