Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Stovall 2, Part 1

In Web Journalism, the author James Stovall has many insightful comments to help improve online writing, specifically journalism.

Ch. 5 - Every Word Counts

In chapter five, three key points caught my eye. Stovall writes,
[Media writers] must put themselves in the background and mold their writing style to fit the demands of the medium they are using.
This is important to remember, specifically for this class, since we have switched from writing blogs to journalism articles. My write up of Dr. Gudelunas' presentation is vastly different from what I wrote about Gisela Gil-Egui. Although they were both highly informative, I attacked each response in completely different styles.

Another key point of Stovall's is to use subheads to break up an article to make it easier to read. I applied this to this particular post to make it easier, since it is lengthy.

One aspect of this chapter where I disagree with Stovall is where he writes that blogs won't replace news sites. Although I agree that our current idea of blogging won't make news sites extinct, I firmly believe that news sites will adapt a style closer to blogging in the future. He's a little off base there.

Ch. 6 - Editing

I love Stovall's museum analogy to understand the idea of hypertextuality. This is a great way to explain the concept to someone who doesn't understand it. When someone walks into a museum, there is no set path to take. There is no beginning or end. Very cool.

Another interesting point he makes is to clean up quotes that have bad grammar. I'll often read sports articles where an athlete will use slang in a quote that would appear in an article. In the quote, random brackets would enclose a word that is not normally substituted. For example, in a recent espn.com article, an athlete says,
"It's a game we definitely had to have coming off the last two [losses]," said Brad Miller, who had 14 rebounds. "It keeps us right there with Los Angeles with our game there [Wednesday night]."
I have no idea why 'losses' or 'Wednesday night' are in brackets. I was never sure if this was OK as a journalistic technique, but now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Also, I never knew that I could subscribe to a comics site, www.mycomicspage.com, for $9.99 a year. I'll have to check that out.

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