25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools

Click the link to find a shortlist of more than 25 of Danny Sanchez's favorite (and mostly free) multimedia tools. Hint on usefulness: Twitter and CoverItLive are on there.

URL: 25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools

Tool Turns Spreadsheets into HTML Charts

When I ran the Web team in Orlando, we used to use a home madetool (by staffer Ray Villalobos)called Table Tango to quickly create Web tables.

So now another ofOrlando's top-tier Web staff, Danny Sanchez, has updated the product and made it available for everyone. Click to Danny's blog post, Journalistopia, to learn more.

Reporters embrace microblogging

AJR has a terrific write-up about Twitter. Besides giving my organization some props for using the platform successfully, it also points out the new ways other news organizations are using it. Let me emphasize "new" as in "more innovative than The Dallas Morning News."

Here's a challenge: This is so easy to do, and costs essentially nothing, so let's get ahead of the curve!

CoverItLive helps bloggers... well... cover it 'live'

When blogging isn't fast enough, but you want to keep people in your blog tool, CoverItLive tool is an interesting plug in.

USAToday used it to cover Treasury secretary Paulson's presser. They combined live blogging of the event with analysis from one of our economics reporters. Also they used it here for the President's presser.

The Post says they used it for live convention coverage, and DMN staffer (and Astros fan)Chris Buckle experienced it 'live' at Chron.com for an Astros game.

So... free lunch to the first dallasnews.com blogging team that test drives it for us. And if you're a dn.com user and you experience our effort, holler about how it was.

When blogging isn't fast enough... now there's Twitter

Poynter's Steve Outing explains how breaking news is moving from blogs to feeds -- often using a provider known as Twitter, here: The Twitter Disaster.

The BBC and CNN have been using Twitter for a while, and at The Dallas Morning News, we have registered a Twitter name (Dallasnewscom) but we haven't yet put it into practice. We will experiment with this in 2008.

Twitter has become the place to get breaking news first

Of thePBS Idea Lab post Twitter has become the place to get breaking news first, Romanesko says:

That's Chris O'Brien's observation. The first quake-related tweet on Tuesday came nine minutes before the AP pushed out its first story. Gawker's Sheila McClear isn't a Twitter fan, though; she calls it "perhaps the most idiotic form of communication of our time."

Twitter tips

J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism just sent out a notice about a niftylearning module they've created called, "Twitter tips." Why shouold you care?

Over the last several months Twitter has finally hit its stride as a leading tool for finding and sharing timely information from all sorts of places and sources. Its usefulness for breaking news is obvious. However, Twitter is equally useful for tracking ongoing stories and issues, getting fast answers or feedback, finding sources, building community, collaborating on coverage, and discovering emerging issues or trends.

Looking for a mashup of crime in your area? It's here

We've talked a lot about databasing crime. Now a startup is doing it. TechCrunch reports that SpotCrime has launched with a mashup that plots crime activity onto Google Maps. This isn't hard stuff, but I wish a newspaper company were doing this instead of a startup. It's our bread and butter.

OK here's a better live blogging platform

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld writes about ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform. Says he:

...it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button.

Sorting the Web's wheat from the chaff

You've probably seen that the much-anticipated second annual Knight News Challenge awards have been handed out.  And the big news has this headline: World Wide Web inventor gets Knight grant.

Tim Berners-Lee's grant aims to do something with tagging (yes, think metadata) that we've needed for a long time: Create a way to sort out credible news from the rest of the stuff. Here's how the plan is sketched out by Knight:

The public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

A dream come true: Flash + Google Maps

Danny Sanchez reports on something that our Web map expert Layne Smith will crow about: A dream come true: Flash + Google Maps.

I know that sounds dry as dust to some of you, but it is a major development. This way we can creating map-based graphics with the same utility as Google Maps, but in a look and feel that is much more dynamic and artful.

Thank you, Google. Go get 'em Layne!

Twitter as the canary in the news coal mine

Jeff Jarvis discusses my favorite obsession in Twitter as the canary in the news coalmine

Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake” and “evacuation”. They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news and second a way to find witness media – photos, videos, and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over – though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts....

More on Twitter as a reporting tool

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo has a good roundup of how Twitter has made her a better reporter, (but she also notes that it is a time suck to.) Here are some of her examples of how it's worked for news:

Twitter users in Southern California during the wildfires used the tool to do local reporting for the benefit of neighbors. Even for people who were evacuated and didn’t have a computer, they could follow the updates on their cell phones. Twitter users were also able to broadcast live updates on the Minnesota bridge collapse just minutes after it happened and before many news outlets could get the details out to the public.

The Iowa Caucuses were also covered by citizen journalists via Twitter, filling in the gaps left by local and national coverage. It also proved to be a good way to keep up with the results on Super Tuesday. We’ve also seen mainstream media embrace Twitter and other new media tools for reporting on important, time-sensitive stories.

More recently, Twitter was at least partially responsible for the release of a young journalist jailed in Egypt, who used his cell phone to send a one word cry for help: “Arrested.”

My obsession with Twitter continues

Michael Arrington discovers a new service that lets you Use TwitterFone For Easy Voice-To-Text On Twitter.

Seems like a funny idea at first blush, but then think of how this can make a reporter become a very fast reporter. He or she simply dials up a number, speaks, "Rick Carlisle has been hired to become the new Dallas Mavericks head coach" and the message goes out as a text alert. I think we should try this out when it's out of beta.

More on journo-Twittering

Michael Merschel found this post on Read Write Web on how their journalists are using Twitter:

The scoffers can scoff all they want, but here at RWW our use of Twitter so far has included:

• the discovery of breaking stories,
• performing interviews,
• quality assurance
• and promotion of our work.

A tech journalist wonders why so few colleagues use Twitter

My third post today on why journalists should use Twitter.  Click this link.

It's becoming an Anthony Moor rant.

UNDERSTAND TWITTER OR DIE.

;-)

The case for using Twitter

OMG, at The case for using Twitter, here are more testimonials, from actual reporters about why journalists should consider Twitter as a new tool for covering a beat.  If you are a reporter and you are reading this click the link, please.

If you work for me (and you know who you are) I suggest you start playing with Twitter now, because we need to be there.

Twitter as a reporting tool

OK so I hope everyone knows what Twitter, the microblogging platform, is now.  Jeff Jarvis says he's heard  of some interesting ways it could be an early warning tool -- like a police scanner -- for news organizations looking for breaking news:

I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine.

Tracking Web 2.0

There are plenty of new startups looking to make life easier; many have merit, but here’s a few tips to help you know what’s going on from Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch:  Tracking Web 2.0.