Focus: Lecture - with Rodney Chester (Week 2)

"Focus" is a section where I will dive in and take a look about something interesting for me, and will share about my interesting point-of-view as well. Have a good read!

Indeed, every student has to learn something after a lecture, and this time on my Monday lecture we were very delighted that Rodney Chester from Courier Mail, shared his views and thoughts about "telling factual stories with text"

So he's mentioned about things recently that technology is slowly replacing the traditional publishing format, such as newspaper. The advancement of technology and social media like Twitter, Facebook are shifting the news headline from newspapers to the Interwebs. Which I do very agree, since for myself I haven't been reading any newspapers since high school where there were concession-priced subscriptions available for students. And I remembered the last time I bought a newspaper in Australia was during the January floods where my favourite newspaper Courier Mail was all sold out, and leaving me no choice but to buy that bulky "The Australian". No offence though!

Well, besides that, he talked about many things about how to write a news article, and one of the most interesting part for me is that he told us about writing features. Students pointed out the "Inverted pyramid" is also one of the most interesting point about the lecture, but I beg to differ and I thought "features writing" is something more interesting for me.

For example, if you are a features writer, you might not be touching headline news often. Instead, you'll be walking around the street, observe people and see what they're doing and walk forward and ask for a story.

Everyone on the street has their own story to tell, and I found that quite fascinating. In these days, people on the street move so quickly to a point they have started to ignore other's presence. It's kind of sad but it's also true in this modern society where everyone is minding their own business a bit too much.

And Rod has mentioned about you have to be a very good observer and storyteller. Also, how to attract audience into reading your stories bit by bit, how to make them intrigued by the stories. Oh, and a "voice" of yourself has to be established and also, one thing that Bruce has pointed out, once you've established your "voice", people will recognise you, and they will start to "follow" you like how they do it on Twitter, but in a manner of reading your editorials, your written stories about ordinary people on the street.

Well, I've got more things to share, but I'll cut it short and I found this lecture really helped me on understanding the fundamentals about text-based writing. This is not fantasy-novel writing like Twilight saga and crap like those, journalism is all about facts, unbiased viewpoint toward a story.

Oh, I've got so much more to learn!! But fret not, Rod shared his best tips to us:

• READ A LOT;
• WRITE A LOT, and;
• IF YOU'VE GOT SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT DON'T POST TO TWITTER.

Write on paper instead, and like us modern peeps, write on blogs!



D.