Planned political events like the annual State of the Union address aren’t the most compelling events to cover, but they can be a low-risk way to plan and test different coverage formats that you can later whip out for unpredictable breaking events. Below are a few of examples, ranging from Bing News to the Washington Post, of how various websites covered this year’s SOTU. The common theme: A live video stream and a live blog combined with some form of reader engagement. Many of the major sites also had a sponsor for their live coverage. Cha-ching!

NPR: Live audio stream with a live blog and live reader chat. 

I appreciated the live blog, though the discussion functionality at a national scale was a little disorienting. 

WhiteHouse.gov: An enhanced broadcast that contained realtime captions, charts, graphs and other data. Social media participation and behind the scenes galleries.

Obviously they had a bit of an access advantage, but I still appreciate how they take an out-of-the-box approach to a standard event. News organizations could steal this concept for after-the-fact video coverage recaps.

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This was a busy year for 10,000 Words. It saw the departure of founder Mark S. Luckie as a regular contributor and the addition of most, if not all, of our current bloggers. What stayed the same, however, was our commitment to sharing great content with you, our readers.

In honor of the end of this year, I’ve compiled a list of the top 11 posts on 10,000 Words. Those that made the list are the top-tweeted posts, not the top stories in terms of pageviews. I used this form of generating the top 11 posts because I think it’s a fair representation of what our tech-savvy readers, many of whom use Twitter, found the most interesting, useful, and worthy of being read and shared.

2012 will be filled with even more posts on the latest tools, gadgets and ideas you can use to enhance your reporting. But we’re always looking to improve. Is there a topic you’d like to see 10,000 Words cover? Let us know in the comments section below or on Twitter.

Without further fanfare, here are our 11 most tweeted posts of 2011.  Read more

Over the years, satirical news organization The Onion has not only poked fun at local, national, international, sports and entertainment news, but also at the people who cover that news — journalists. This is a collection of some of the best articles, videos and commentary about newspapers and TV media from The Onion.
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Every Friday I post links to a few of the blog posts that I read during the week that I found interesting and insightful.

Included in this week’s round-up are posts that look at what it means to connect with someone online, and what comes after; case studies on how journalists can best use Facebook; advice on stimulating activity in an online community; and Ustream’s great new Facebook app.

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Two neat data visualization tools recently came on the scene which will be a great help for journalists and datamongers alike: Sparktweets and Chartwell.

Sparktweets is the brainchild of Zach Seward, Outreach Editor for The Wall Street Journal. Sparktweets builds on Edward Tufte’s invention, the sparkline, which is a small, high-resolution graph embedded in a context of words, numbers, or images. You see these mostly used on financial websites to describe the rise and fall of stocks, but Sparktweets takes this idea and builds on it by embedding Unicode histograms within Twitter’s 140-character limit. The effect is pretty neat. Take a look at these.

Create your own Sparktweets here: http://www.datacollective.org/sparkblocks.html

The second tool I came across recently is a font called Chartwell from font designer Travis Kochel with TK Type. Creating pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs has never been so simple. Just type your data numbers into an equation and you can have a graph in just a few seconds. In line with current trends, you can also embed the use of this font using the CSS3 property @font-face to create live charts on the fly (currently, this only works in Firefox 4). Travis includes more information on the Chartwell page at http://www.tktype.com/chartwell.php.

The fonts are $15 each (pie, bar, or line), or $40 for the entire set.