In today’s class Ms. Townley talked about page design and Ms. Schubert about ethical and legal issues. Ms. Townley talked about links and how they allow the storyteller tell the story.
Content curation is another topic discussed on Monday afternoon. According to Ms. Townley, “Is the gathering, the organization and the presentation of content that currently exist online.”
Examples of this are blogs that use little to no original content but gather from other sources, or the photo site Pinterest. Another example talked later on the lecture was the Drudge aggregation website.
Regarding the topic of links, they were described as mediums that can be used to back up information or to provide details or information about related issues.
Ms. Townley said that when dealing with storytelling in journalism, you want to make sure you choose links carefully and present the information that draws your audience’s attention. Another tip given was to create links with three to five words.
At the end Ms. Townley discussed how page design has changed with the new mediums and mobile devices we access content. At the beginning of web design, “scrolling” was not acceptable and clinking menus was acceptable instead of scrolling because was believed that people were not going to scroll and seemed impractical when dealing with big amounts of information.
Now, not only scrolling but push notifications, sharing, and the ability to follow content, make easier to get the content to audiences and thus, web page designers do not worry about page design as in the past for a strict non-scrolling design.
At the end of the lecture, legal and ethical issues were discussed. Ms. Schubert explained how online journalists can be sued for libel. Obscenity was defined as “material that describes or displays sexual material in such a way as to cause arousal and the lacks artistic, literary or scientific value, and it is not protected by the first amendment,” while indecency as “a range of sexual and non-sexual material including certain words, nudity and things that offend manners or morals.”
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