This week was a guest lecture with Rod Chester; the topic: Telling Factual Stories With Text. As a columnist from Courier Mail he had some interesting insights into the profession of writing. It sounds like a cut throat industry, where the C.M hires 8 journalists a year, and you are at constant risk of being "hacked to death by bastard subs". He mentioned the inverted pyramid concept. This entails opening a story with the "who, what, when, where, why, and how" content, and following with other peripheral details decending in relevance. This strategem is done due to commertial pressures to make the writing attract as much attention as possible as early in the column as possible, and to conserve relevant detail as "subs" often cut articles from the bottom. Chester mentioned that in Australia in times of crisis people return to newspapers as their primary source of information, which was certainly true by my observation in the first days of the outbreak. He lamented the fact that sales of physical newspapers were dropping however.
Chester also mentioned the boredom of writing factual news (As to this, i reply that i would welcome the tediousness of recording pre-apocalyptic fact over having to observe the events of contemporary society). He mentioned that a story often needs to be approached from a different angle to the mainstream approach so as to thwart competitors for sales. He mentioned the corporeality of the concept "newsworthy" and that it defies definition, and is reliant upon intuition to find.
Overall the lecture was rather intereresting, but the information he gave is completely irrelevant in todays post-mortem perpetual riot.
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