Writing & Editing for Electronic Media

• Demonstrate an understanding of the origins and characteristics of interactive media
• Locate and analyse information about the audience for electronic publications and make appropriate decisions about the subject matter and style of textual content for those publications
• Create and format textual content for electronic publications
• Write, record, digitise, edit and stream a short audio package
• Be aware of the genres of textual content in electronic publications including emerging styles such as blogs and wikis.

In this module students plan, write and publish a content-rich multimedia website-often working with a professional editor on a real-world publication. Lectures and seminars on web writing, user-generated content, and the effective use of multimedia are complemented by hand-on workshops. In the fast-changing web publishing environment the content of these workshops changes rapidly and may include blogging, RSS feeds, Twittering, streaming audio and video and mashups using, for example, Google maps. In addition, a constant of this class is the provision of a solid grounding in: the lingua-franca of the web-XHTML; and the production of semantic markup. This module, taught by Neil Thurman, often revolves around a project with a real web publication and professional online editors. In previous years students have worked with:

• Alfred Hermida from BBC News Online
• Caspar Melville, from Opendemocracy.net
• Tim Hood, CEO and founder of crowd-sourced online news magazine, Yoosk.com
• Alex Kirby from BBC News Online
• Richard Burton from Telegraph.co.uk
• Mark Arnold from Sony UK
• Paul Eedle from Out There News
• Dominic Wells from AOL

Students' Feedback

• "Good course, Enthusiastic staff, Well-organised"
• "Working on Yoosk [the coursework project] has been a major highlight of my studies. It was a big personal challenge that was ultimately very satisfying."
• "This module has allowed me to develop journalistic skills which I feel that I can confidently transfer over to the working world. The practical nature of the work (i.e., conducting interviews, producing a feature and a website) has provided a me with a substantial knowledge of writing and editing for the web."
• "This is the key module for the whole course."

Alumni

Students taking this module who have gone on to successful careers as multimedia content producers and editors include:

• Gareth Scurlock, deputy travel editor, Timesonline.co.uk
• Elizabeth Amailuk, Network and Communications Manager at Health Action International
• Heather Barker, Owner & Communications Specialist, Clearly Content
• James Brown, Online writer at Melcrum
• Laurie Harrison, Electronic Operations Manager ELT, Cambridge University Press
• Ben Lupton, Project Manager at reallyenglish.com
• Caroline Moran, Web Editor at King's College London
• Mark Ramsay, Editorial Executive, BBC