"These aren't the droids you're looking for"
With this brilliant quotation from Star
Wars Chris Wheal, freelance journalist, editor, and consultant,
gained our attention during the first lecture on Online publishing
platform held last Tuesday at the London School of Journalism (LSJ).
First of all he asked us to search for each
other on the internet using search engines as google or bing, in order to
discover if we are easily findable on the web or not. Pragmatic from the
beginning!
He showed us how easy it's to find him
on websites simply writing his name and surname, and then he started listing the
most known social media, such as
·
Facebook
·
Google+
·
MySpace
·
Tumblr
·
Twitter
·
Blogger
·
Snapchat
·
Youtube
·
Wordpress
·
What’s App
·
Pinterest
·
LinkedIn
·
Instagram
·
Periscope
·
Flickr
·
Audioboom
·
Viber
·
Vimeo
·
Vine
·
Swarm
·
Storify
·
Medium
·
Fousquare
·
Soundcloud
Therefore he explained to us what are
the differences in online journalism and what we should take into account when
we are writing a blog post or an article online. He also showed how easily is
posting something on the internet: he
recorded a short video of the lesson posting it on Youtube.
He said that management and staff,
students and lecturers, adults and children, all of them surf the internet, not
only our target audience! Moreover users don’t like to scroll or maybe they are
brought to the site without seeking it. The best thing to do is let them know
exactly what they will find out from the page since the very first paragraph, or
even communicate the aim of the post within 10 seconds.
Therefore he suggested to use impressionable
headlines, short sentences, paragraphs between two and four lines, an objective
language instead of emotive phrases, ‘you’ and ‘we’ rather than the third
person. All of these tips hoping that web users will keep reading our article!
A good mixture of links, images, key
words, tags and bullet points, and the game is done! We must always check if we
have observed all the main rules when we finish an article, and then we are ready
to post it!
As his last advise, Chris suggested to
use search engines such as
in order to do our research and he invited
us to have a look at the BBC Online website if sometimes we forget the typical
British web newspapers style and structure…you never know if there’s a student
with a memory like a sieve!
At the end of the lesson, we had an
assignment that consisted in writing down the platforms we are signed up, our
usernames, the percentage of our profile we have completed for that platform and
if we make posts often, sometimes, rarely or never. Easy!
But soon Chris added also two other assignments
with which we should demonstrate we have paid attention during the lesson: one
article must have news/factual style (you can read it on my personal Wordpress site) and the other one must have the typical
chatty style of the blog (my Blogger blog url is
silviascicchitano.blogspot.co.uk). Quite challenging!
He claimed to be one of the most b*****d
professor to put marks…but we are brave! So…