Resources (LINKS!)

This is a list of links I’ve been compiling over the years. It is continually updated. Credit goes to a number of sources, including Amy Webb of Webbmedia Group and Katy Culver of University of Wisconsin-Madison and so many others.

Organizing and Storage Tools

• Ping: Allows you to update your various social media status from one app.
• DropBox: Great place to put documents etc that you’d like to share with people. Also a good way to backup your stuff on the cloud. Course you have to remember to actually upload the file.
• SugarSync: Like DropBox, this allows you to upload files to the cloud. You can share them too. You do have to pay to upgrade.
• Evernote: Kind of like Delicious but on a much grander scale. Allows you to capture actual web pages, video, everything and stores it both locally and on the cloud; has apps that help you organize. Quite nifty.
• Delicious: Allows you to capture links and organize them like a clipping file
• Selective Tweets: Updates your Facebook with only the Tweets you choose
• Tweecious: A Firefox add-on that will aggregate your twitter feed for you into your delicious account
• Stich.it: This is a great program that allows you to create, say, a presentation of websites.

Reporting Online (Finding Information, Search, Networking)

• Helioid.com: Search engine that does data visualization around the keyword. In beta.
• Greplin.com allows you to go back in time and and find that URL you wanted to write down but never did. Let’s you search all of your own files in DropBox. It is a personalized search engine basically.
• Quora: Crowd-sourced questions and answers.
• Viewdle: A social camera (for Android; in beta); Imagine being in a crowded meeting and being able to identify that source speaking by pointing your phone camera at them and having your phone tell you who they are.
• Emotional Surveying! Check out what the Guardian has been doing with gauging emotional environment for people.
• Precognition reporting (in other words: what’s the future?): Terminator Vision app (created during a hackathon) and Recorded Future to keep you up on future trends etc. Cool, cool stuff.
• Social proximity networks: These sites go beyond Foursquare and gowalla to target very specific social circles – Shortlist (conference networking; in beta), Sonar (uses Foursquare to identify who is next to you), Street Spark, and Nerd Nearby.
• Ethics of Online Reporting: ASNE’s 10 Best Practices of Social Media

Multimedia Concepts, Programs, Examples

• Storyboarding:Everything you wanted to know about storyboarding from the Knight Digital Media Center.
• EXAMPLE: Hungry: Maisie Crow, Independent: A wonderful example of a multimedia slideshow, with a bit of video thrown in. Great storytelling, fabulous imagery and wonderful use of sound. For more information about the piece, check out what Crow said on this site.
• PhotoSynth: From Microsoft, this program uses your photos and creates a 3D image from them.
• EXAMPLE: Denise McGill’s Autism Photos: This is work by a freelance photographer.
• Rule of Thirds: An instructional video from Metacafe. Useful and short.
• Resolution: A fun graphic about pixels.
• EXAMPLE: 9/11 Memorial Photo: This a collection of photos from the New York Times from the 9/11 anniversary. Great work with framing, aesthetics, and crowd focusing!
• EXAMPLE: Home Delivery: A great idea for a slideshow by Roanoke.com (though it could use some more images)
• EXAMPLE: Dying days of cockfighting in America: A Washington Post slideshow. Wonderful audio in there! I do wonder what people think about the particular pairings of the photos with the audio though: does it work?
• Windshields: This is just an Amazon link to what a windshield looks like and costs. Cheap and sooooo worth it! You can get them in different sizes, for a lav or whatever you happen to have!
• Audacity tutorial: From the Knight Digital Media Center
• Soundslides tutorial: From the Knight Digital Media Center
• Troubleshooting Wiki for Audacity, iMovie, SoundSlides
• JQuery: EASY timeline!! 
• Automatic Video Editing with Magisto
• Motion Graphics: ONA article about why motion graphics can make for good, animated exploiters. With examples. Also here is a tutorial for After Effects, which is an Adobe product that does them.
• Dipity: Dipity is an online (free!) timeline tool.
• Other timelines: Timeline with a WP plugin; Timeglider; TimeRime; Timetoast; Verite,Meograph. And then there is VuVox – A strange little program that people love because it allows you to play out a story with text, photos and video embedded. It’s also super easy to use, if somewhat buggy. However, you should know that it’s no longer being developed and thus its bugs are there forever.
• Mobile LIVE video streaming: Definitely something to think about when you are thinking about covering an event!
• Augmented Reality is coming!
• EXAMPLE: Motion Graphics at Wall Street Journal
• EXAMPLE: Sarah Karon’s Vuvox project
• EXAMPLE: NYT’s The Lions of Tawhid
• SoundCloud: SoundCloud is an excellent platform that does anything and everything with audio storytelling. “Capture a voice, moment or music in seconds or upload audio you’ve already created.” You can also search audio and share.
• EXAMPLE: NYT feature on the 2012 election. A basic slideshow with no audio, but I like some of the angles of a basic crowd.
• A wonderful article about 10 ways to take interesting portrait photos.
• A fabulous Poynter piece about shot sequencing.
• EXAMPLE: A day in the life of a campaign reporter. Fun. From Politico.

Interactive Platforms, Tools

• Tablets and iPads: As an up and coming platform for news publishing, we must consider how content will play on mobile devices like the iPad.
• Tumblr: A blogging platform that is more conducive to crowdsourcing and conversation. Becoming more popular among journalists.
• Jaiku: A Twitter-like platform that allows you to have a single thread of conversation
• Storyful: Aggregates curated material for news organizations and others from throughout the social-media sphere.
• Linking: Wonderful blog post by Jeff Jarvis (and the many commenters) about the value of linking.
• The neutral tweet debate: How can a journalist retweet without it seeming as if he or she endorses the content in the original tweet?
• Yahoo Pipes: Basically a powerful search engine that crawls the web and captures specific content and then lets you aggregate it and work with it, mashing it up.
• Twitter trending topics. These are good to follow so you can keep up with certain aspects of your beat, find sources and utilize crowdsourcing techniques.
• Google hot trends. These are good to follow so you can keep up with certain aspects of your beat, find sources and utilize crowdsourcing techniques. They also come in handy when you think about headers, keywords and tagging.
• Storify: A curating tool, which is a way to aggregate tweets on a specific topic and a new kind of storytelling.
• Live Blogging: Newsrooms love CoverItLive to live blog events or discussions with readers.
• Online Guestbooks: This allows people to share memories or document their presence during tragedy. A great service to help build community.
• Google Circles and Journalists
• Facebook and Journalism
•  EXAMPLE: Covering the Riots
• EXAMPLE: State Street Redevelopment Plan
• EXAMPLE: Damage in Haiti (Wall Street Journal, 2010)
• EXAMPLE: What happened: Death of Jean Charles de Menezes  (BBC, 2007)
• EXAMPLE: Scenes from a Ruined Boulevard (NYT, 2010)
• EXAMPLE: WashingtonPost’s Conversations
• EXAMPLE: Obama’s TownHallTweeted
• EXAMPLE: How to build a wind farm (Interactive Graphic; BBC, 2011)
• EXAMPLE: Coming home a different person (Interactive Graphic; WashingtonPost, 2012)

Storytelling Today

• Narratively: A cool new New-York-based project that strives to tell the stories of the weird, interesting and cool people in the Big Apple. Trying to get funding via kickstarter.
• Kickstarter: Kickstarter is an online forum to connect people who have interesting projects with donors.
• The Pulitzer Center is doing some really great long-form storytelling these days, particularly with a new project involving e-book publishing.
• The blog as a narrative form. This is mediajunk’s proposal for a longer essay, but I liked what was said in a fairly short amount of space about blogging as story.

Finding, Building Audiences Online

• Building Audiences
• Search Engine Optimization article: To learn more about SEO, check out this longish-but-free beginner’s guide to SEO
• Keyword help: Google Adwords (free), WordTracker (paid), and Keyword Discovery (paid).
• To find a place for your long reads: Check out Byliner and Longreads.

Detecting BS Online

• RegretThe Error
• How Long Have You Been Tweeting? Check how long the twitter account has been around.
• Klout: Everyone who has been active in social media has garnered a “score” of 1-100. The higher the score, the more active and influential they are.
• Identify (Firefox) and HoverMe (Chrome): A way to identify someone online; shows you their combined social-media profile.
• Exif: data embedded on photos. Accessing the data via any number of programs can show you, among other things, date and time the photo was taken.
• Image Error Level Analysis: This helps you determine if an image has been manipulated.
• WhoisNet: Allows you to look up the history of a domain name.
• PRChecker: Check’s Google’s page ranking of any site.

Good places to look for public-domain images, videos, etc.

• Creative Commons
• Flickr: But make sure you read the license agreements under each image/video!!
• YubNub: This is actually a very specific search engine. If you type in something like “find a creative-commons license for Romney,” it will.
• Wikimedia
• Archive.org: Basically a digital library. Also home to the waybackmachine.
• Netlabels: For music
• Check out this list of 30 free sites for images etc!

Data Visualization

• New York Times Developer
• Congress Speaks: A feature using NYT Developer data
• Google Fusion Tables: These are great for any kind of data visualization. This link brings you to a slideshow about how to do the tables. Here are Fusion tutorials.  Mapping the Storm Clean-up uses Fusion tables to crowd-source a NY snowstorm (via texts). Here is another good tutorial.
• Google Maps API
• Data Visualization via Computers: Check out what Radiohead did with their video for House of Cards. In Google Code, you can start thinking about your own kind of data visualization.
• Tableau: A fabulous program that allows you to create data visualizations without knowing any coding!

Ethics and Law for Journalists

• The three copyright mistakes that bloggers make, including Fair Use and Pictures
• Fair Use law by Stanford
• Code of Best Practices on Copyright and Fair Use from American University
• Research Paper: Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public’s Right to Know: How Journalists Think About Fair Use from American University. Interesting paper. Useful.

Great Sources of Information for Reporters

• US Census: Data on anything and everything derived form the government’s regular census (sometimes down to the neighborhood!)
• Gallop Polls: Need some quick gauges of how people are thinking on certain topics?
• Lexis Nexis: Accessed through your university or newsroom subscriptions, this database will show you everything that’s been written on a topic in major news pubs, trade press and everything in between.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission: The SEC holds all the filings for all public and nonprofit companies such as annual reports. Great reading!
• The US Government & Accountability Office: Nicknamed the government watchdog, GAO has reports and testimonies of all their investigations into various federal policies.
• Hoovers: A great resource (particularly if your school or news organizations) for information on industries and business.

OTHER EXAMPLES AND COOL STUFF

• Jing: Jing is a free program that lets you capture and record what is happening on your own monitor. It’s a great way to explain a complex image using your pointer and a voice-over, for example.
• Flickr Clock: Just a new way of thinking about organizing content.
• MediaCloud is a way to track news as it filters through the blogosphere. You can see what topics are trending. Here is the video I showed in class as well.
• Games
• Learning in New Formats
• Earning Badges:
• i-Report: CNN’s sharing site.
• i-Report in Second Life
• Pew Report: This is where I get all my cool stats.
• The article is breaking up
• Is Twitter text or speech?
• What I learned in Joplin
• Washington Post’s Social Media Rules
• Madison.com Interactives
• NYT Graphic
• StoryPlanet: A platform for telling stories
• Zeega: Cool new ways to tell stories
• Klynt: Pricy but interesting new storytelling platform
• Gamification: Poynter piece about turning journalism into video games, and also the essay that inspired the piece.
• Budget Heros: Fun video game to explain budgets by marketplace.

Staying Current in Digital Journalism and Digital Storytelling

• Mashable: Wonderful social-media news blog
• Press Think: Jay Rosen
• Reportr.net: Alfred Hermida (former BBC reporter turned academic)
• MediaDecoder: NYT media blog
• BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis
• Mastering Multimedia: some great archived pieces in here on tips
• Romenesko: Jim Romenesko’s blog (formerly of Poynter)
• Sportshooter: wonderful forums on multimedia and photography (run by sports journalists but lots of people read it)
• DigiDave: David Cohn of Spot.us fame
• 10000 Words
• After Photography
• Innovative Interactivity
• Multimedia Evangelist
• Multimedia Muse
• MultimediaShooter
• Nieman Storyboard
• Society for News Design