Puns4Priya

Easter is just around the corner but today we are going on a Headline Hunt, sorry, not sorry chocolate lovers. A headline that has caused quite a stir recently was one by the Telegraph, “Muggy Mike Thalassitis, former Love Island star, dies aged 26”. I heard about this headline on Instagram when lots of people were putting it on their Instagram stories and then it became a topic of discussion in my own private conversations with my friends.

The reason his death was so big was because, yes many of my friends watched the Love Island series which he was in but it was surprising to hear the way he died, he had commit suicide. . He was found hanged in a park in North London where he would play as a child. His death was surprising because even a man of all his riches and fame he felt that the only way for him to be happy was by his suicide.

But not only was his death shocking to hear and read about, the way most people found out was initially by the headline posted by the Telegraph. Now in the Headline the telegraph in fact have tried to use humour by calling him ‘Muggy Mike’ instead of stating his actual name which is Mile Thalasstis. It’s disrespectful and hurtful to not only his family and friends but anyone else that may also be going through depressive/suicidal thoughts. There was a big uproar about this on Twitter when one of Love Islands’ stars from a former series blew up. Chris Hughes said, ‘his name wasn’t Muggy Mike. Please stop brandishing that.” And I completely agree with what Chris is saying here, no one’s suicide should be talked about as if he was some sort of product, it’s dehumanising and disrespectful.

Well, well, well, the digital world is sure an outer world experience. No really, you can even access the internet on the moon these days. Is there anywhere you can’t keep updated?

I can guarantee that when you woke up this morning one of the first things you did was check your phone and see what news there was to be updated with, I sure did. Instagram has up to 400 million users daily and twitter has a whopping 126 million! That’s a hell of a lot of people sharing and reading information for just one day. But is this a good thing? Yes, you may always be updated but have you ever thought to consider that maybe what you are reading is in fact fake news? Are people just trying to get your attention to get across their viewpoint? Or, even worse are people trying to make money out of you?

If we look at other platforms like online magazines there are hundreds of different articles published all about the same thing just worded slightly differently. So which stories true or which product actually works best? The decision is yours.

In the past the way to find out what product works best for your skin or to get slightly dark, who murdered who was only by your local newspaper or your family members and close friends. But now, you could read an article written by somebody across the globe or find out about a product by simply doing an Instagram poll and sharing it with your audience you have created yourself. But it’s important to bear in mind that if you don’t know all your followers personally then how can you trust their opinion on something like you would with your family and friends? The answer is, you can’t. By putting yourself online you take the risk.

Blogs are one of those things you can never do rightly or wrong. It’s down to you with what you write about and who you direct it at. Although, it’s all well doing a blog but is it any point if people aren’t noticing it, surely, you’d just be wasting your time?

Here are my top tips on how to get your blog noticed because trust me, there’s a lot of completion nowadays.

1. Write about something that come from a place of passion. Passion motivates us bloggers to create the best content we can so don’t just write about a topic to follow a trend. Create your own trend and express your own voice. A little bit of confidence is all you need that your own voice is enough.

2. With this confidence you need to showcase it. So broadcast your blog to family and friends. This could be by telling them about it in person or over message or better yet, posting it on your social media accounts to reach an even wider audience. You never know, what you share could be shared by your followers and then before long you’ve got a following going. It’s not what you know sometimes, it’s who you know.  

3. It’s also important that you are consistent with your content. You need to be uploading content at a certain rate that your followers can keep updated with and follow. This way your following will grow, and your audience will become a lot stronger.

4. With consistent content ideas are going to need to be original and striking so that your followers and future followers don’t get bored. In this case planning blogs would be a good idea. Brainstorming ideas allows you to improve your posts over time and make them appropriate for your blog. Ideas are the building blocks of a masterpiece.

5. Even though producing content is very important, the quality of your content is far more important than the quantity. So rather than posting something new every day or two, post once a week and work on something that reflects one of your best pieces of content instead. Always remember, quality over quantity.

6. It’s all well preparing and creating all this content but no one’s going to look at it if it doesn’t look good. With so much competition on the market people are going to “judge a book by its cover” as per say, so presentation needs to be intriguing to get people to read it and carry on reading your content. The best way to do this is to create a theme that can be associated with your blog so that your content can be recognised from the get-go. Make sure you keep the layout clean though, if you do this it directs more focus to the content you have put work into and will make your blog more successful. Aesthetic draws attention but what’s on the inside, keeps it.

Television talent, Jodie Whitaker has come exceedingly far since graduating at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2005. Since then she has made her name in ITVs show, Broadchurch and recently became the first female Doctor in Doctor Who!

Jodie lets loose and gives us a closer peak of her childhood memories and embarrassing moments when asked some questions about herself. She takes us on a trip to her past when telling us about how one of her earliest memory is when she was on a family holiday in Benidorm at age three. She says that she specifically remembers falling into a pool and in the panic of it all she was convinced that “a mysterious giant” got her out but it was in fact her father saving his little girl.

Since her infant years she admits that she has found a guilty pleasure of wine and drinks “half a bottle a day” as well as claiming it to be her favourite smell! But is it surprising when she is guzzling a big 3 and half bottles of the stuff a week! Let’s hope she doesn’t go near a pool anytime soon. However, Jodie’s love for booze is no surprise seeming that even in her late teens when she worked at a soap factory in Huddersfield she would turn up “basically hungover everyday”. I wonder how long she kept up with that job for? Although, she says that she wouldn’t change this about her past but instead states getting her tongue pierced at age 15 alongside having train-track braces was a “huge error”. Its clear that Jodie was a bit of a rebel but her spontaneous side is what has got her to where she is today.

Well, we all enjoy satire. Who doesn’t love a good laugh right? But the question that comes up is; do we really give a thought to the issue that is raised? The Egyptian era demonstrates how satire uses humour and irony to ridicule people and society.

Satire has been used for centuries, even the pharaohs are probably still giggling in their tombs at one another. In the Egyptian tale of ‘Princess Ahura’ the girl convinces her father Merpentan to let her marry her brother Naneferkaptah: I said to him (i.e. her father): "Let me marry the son of a general, and let him marry the daughter of another general, so that our family may increase!" I laughed and Pharaoh laughed. Of course, this would be absurd in a modern society but the idea itself is humorous and could sway an audience into laughter. Comparing this to modern society we can see how times have changed because a marriage like this would be illegal by laws put in place.

Sticking with this era it’s clear to see how different social classes will find different things funny. While the oppressed working classes would see the funny sides of their "betters", upper class scribes must have thought the descriptions of the various tradesmen in the ‘Satire of the Trades’ to be hilarious:  I do not see a stoneworker on an important errand or a goldsmith in a place to which he has been sent, but I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the door of his furnace. His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank more than fish excrement. This sort of satire reveals the social ladder of people in that society and belittles the social lower class to make the middle/upper class seem more superior.

There is a constant debate on whether it’s right or wrong for journalists to intrude into the lives of other people. Janet Malcolm is a journalist and says that, “every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confident man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse”. Here Janet is stating that all journalists are in fact “betraying” their interviewees because they are “preying” on them. Janet’s use of harsh language suggests that journalists are in the wrong for this.

Sometimes to get vital information that may be needed by the government journalists have to “betray” those they are interviewing as such in order to get to the real story to produce the truth. That’s what good journalism is. If we were to look at the Jessica Lal murder case, we can see evidence of this as the accused were ultimately punished in accordance with law because of the valiant effort taken up by the journalists concerned. Therefore, if the journalists hadn’t gone to the efforts of deriving the truth from the criminals then they would still be on the loose and at harm to other people. The blame should not be put on the journalists for this, it’s those who go against the law.

Many journalists have died or been seriously injured from trying to do the right thing by getting vital information for the government. For example, it’s been shown that the number of deaths of journalists have “nearly doubled” in the last year which means that even more journalists have been going to extremes of trying to derive information and they are putting their life on the line for their job and country. This means that journalists are going to extremes to get information that does not make them a bad person like Janet’s explanation makes journalists out to be by the qualities that she listed.

In saying this not all journalism involves betrayal as such, many journalists are very respectful to those they are interviewing. An example of peaceful journalism could be the journalists that were interviewing the public at this year’s grand opening to the New Year in London.  Here the journalists were interviewing those they had permission from so there was no “preying” on the public involved here. The people being interviewed knew that their conversation with the journalist would be broadcasted on live television which goes against what Janet stated because if they were doing anything wrong, why would it be broadcasted?

Being a university student myself I see a lot of students ordering takeaways very regularly because it’s an easy option for quick food. But what a lot of them aren’t aware of is the hygiene that goes into the preparation of the food like you would if they made it themselves.

I asked 10 of my friends if they knew the hygiene rating of the food they order and every one of them said they had never checked, even with 3 of them having allergies! That’s a huge risk, not only for those who could have an allergic reaction but those who don’t too and it could mean they become very ill or much worse.  

If we take a look at a report by The Guardian they revealed that “one is seven UK takeaways have failed food hygiene tests”. This means that if you order a takeaway in the UK there is a chance you could get ill from the food or worse and it has happened recently. The Telegraph tells us how 15 year old Megan Keen from Accrington ordered a takeaway with her friends and even though she specified she had a nut allergy after she had eaten her takeaway she was rushed to hospital and later died there. This was all because the food was not prepared properly and people should not be dying from someone else’s error.

Blogging has changed journalism for the good whether those who favour it or not want to admit it, if it wasn’t for the introduction of blogging our generation would not be as aware to it.

In the past journalism was presented only by a newspaper and magazine which meant that if you wanted to read about a topic you’d have to go out and buy it. Despite this still being present in todays society we have been introduced to computerised journalism which is now recognised by the term ‘blogging’. It allows anyone, anywhere to write and publish their own work easily and freely.

This not only gives the readers a chance to expand on their knowledge completely free of charge and at their own will, but it also gives the writer themselves a way that they can put their own opinion and tone on something that they are passionate about and share it with the world- something that old journalism would struggle to do because it isn’t readily available 24/7 and across all regions in the world.

It doesn’t just give professional writers a chance to give their voices either, it also gives everyone the chance to showcase what that they have to say. This is an aspect I love about blogging because it gives both young and old minds a chance to learn because blogging gives writers the opportunity to easily engage with their audience. Unlike old journalism where people would write for a publishing company and wait for responses to be printed. But now anyone with an electronic device with access to the internet can both get immediate responses and give immediate feedback. a

Through the communication aspect of blogging it not only allows the blogger a chance to interact with their audience, but it also lets the bloggers interact with one another and instead of creating competition it creates more of a society. For example, Tumblr is a network where people write blog posts and share it with people who write too. An engagement like this builds a society where all interests & opinions are accepted which is a community that I have never seen in old journalism.