SubscribeFree like Freedom Fries
September 3, 2009 at 6:53 p.m.
Want to do your next multimedia project without emptying your wallet? Mark Luckie over at 10,000 Words has you covered: 8 Ways to save money on your next multimedia project.
Truth is, most of what a journalist needs to work online is free, and a lot (often the best) is open source: Visualizing data? Try Django or ManyEyes (depending on how you feel about code). Want photo galleries? Embed a Flickr slide show, or go nuts on Vuvox. Need a wiki on your site? Here's four options.
How much good, no-cost stuff is out there?
Tools for News teams up with SND
February 2, 2009 at 4:36 p.m.
The toolkit for online journalists has moved to a new home with the Society for News Design.
Shortly after I launched Tools for News in late December, Tyson Evans from SND emailed me about teaming up on the project. Matt Mansfield helped convince me to come on board. Chrys Wu has more on the hackathon that got it all migrated.
The toolkit is now part of a growing network of apps and sites under SND's banner. Expect development to pick up and the overall look and feel of the site to improve.
Everyone's login should still work. If ...
Lessons from Spot.us
January 24, 2009 at 9:25 p.m.
I'm about to leave the warm embrace of the Bay Area and in doing so, take myself out of the jurisdiction of Spot.us. I was lucky enough to meet David Cohn when the San Jose Mercury News opened its newsroom for CopyCamp last year, and he suggested I pitch something in his alpha phase. At that point it was just a simple wiki, The Point and David's seemingly-infinite energy.
In December, when Spot.us launched officially with its new site and its own mechanisms for handling donations, my story was published and republished and spread farther than ...
New tool: TwitBlog for LiveBlogging with Twitter
January 15, 2009 at 10:39 p.m.
Let's say you want to live-blog something. Let's say you like Twitter. Twitter is great for immediacy, but what if you want to round up all your tweets at the end of the day and put them in a blog post? You'd have to copy each one, reformat it, then put the whole list in chronological order.
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Production notes:
I put this little app together yesterday after thinking about it a lot longer. It's a simple Django-powered tool that converts a feed from Twitter Search into plain text or ...
Product, not Process
June 1, 2008 at 1:41 a.m.
Journalism, like so many crafts, is often about the process more than the product. A good story will show the trail of reporting and let the reader in on the oblique conventions of policy or public happenings.
Online, too, there is a need for engagement, for openness, not just by those we cover, but by us, the journalists.
But in many ways, the process of getting newspapers from ink on paper to text and multimedia online is getting bogged down by process, when more people really ought to be thinking about the product.
I spoke to a reporter yesterday who ...
