Scott Porad, the former CTO of Cheezburger who is now leading product development at Rover.com, has launched a site called The New New Media News to serve as a “central location for reading news about the new media, and seeing examples of new media done well.”

The site — kind of like a Subreddit — lets you post, share and comment on the evolving landscape of online media and digital storytelling. You can post a link, discussion topic, photo or video to the site under the category of commentary, examples or Q&A. Each item can be upvoted or downvoted. Each user has a profile, and the ability to be followed. And there’s a handy bookmarklet that you book in your bookmarks bar so that you can easily share any links on the web.

Because the site is new, content is a little sparse, but I could see this site evolving into a valuable resource for anyone obsessed with digital storytelling trends.

Here’s a tool to help annotate and direct people to points of interest in any last minute campaign rally videos or the CNN punch-drunkness vids hopefully to come after tomorrow night’s election coverage.

A few weeks ago we highlighted TubeChop as an easy-to-use tool for highlighting parts of a YouTube video relevant to your story. EmbedPlus is another such tool, but with a handful of other additional, useful features.

EmbedPlus, available as a Chrome extension, WordPress plugin and simple wizard, allows you as a journalist to (among other things):

• Annotate YouTube videos, placing your own text and links (perhaps “explainers” or more context) at designated times
• Crop videos to the interesting or relevant portions, per the same idea we outlined for TubeChop
• Mark several jump-to points (“chapters”) relevant to your coverage, so a reader doesn’t have to go searching
• Provide quick access to conversations (“reactions”) to the YouTube video on social platforms like Reddit and Twitter

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A yet-to-be-launched tool called Meograph promises to let you easily “create, playback and share beautiful stories in the context of when and where.” It’s a tool that’s still in pre-beta, but journalists and news organizations can get priority access for an invite.

Meograph released a demo of what the tool can do, using the fictional KVWM San Diego TV station as an example use case. Based on the examples, I wouldn’t yet call the resulting product “beautiful,” but the storytelling format is a compelling mishmash: timeline + audio + Google Maps + images + video+  hyperlinks (for adding more context and linking to stories).

Misha Leybovich, founder and CEO, told me this via email about Meograph:

Meograph helps automatically create, share, and watch interactive multimedia stories.  Our first product pairs Google Earth with a timeline and multimedia overlays to tell stories in context of where and when.

Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface.  Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in 2 min or dig into for an hour.  Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics … Meograph is both.

I’m not quite convinced that there are many use cases where this exact mishmash of media is the most powerful way to tell a story, but if you have any ideas, let me know in the comments. If you’re interested in testing the tool for a news organization, email journalism@memograph.com.

Last week we told you about easel.ly for creating beautiful infographics in your browser, but we had a few gripes — it didn’t let you manipulate data or change color schemes, two things that are vital to custom infographics. Infogr.am, also a tool in beta,  lets you do both of those things and more —  perfect for a journalist, blogger or social media editor on a deadline.

The tool is dead simple, and with preset fonts, colors and templates, it’s hard to make something that doesn’t look great. See my quick example below (which, by the way, doesn’t display real data on Twitter followers).

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Did you know that infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared vs. text? At least that’s the claim that Easel.ly makes on its homepage. The new site, a project in beta, makes it super easy to use drag-n-drop templates to create beautiful infographics for free.  A demo video is embedded below:

For newsrooms, this site poses huge opportunity in terms of shareability of information across social media. Newspapers are the worst offenders when it comes to forgetting about graphics that make sense for the web. They’ll often repurpose something that ran in print, and often that graphic isn’t compelling enough to share on social networks — a space where visuals are constantly competing for users’ attention. But easel.ly is so easy to use that resources don’t have to pulled away from graphic designers; it’s a site that social media editors can use.

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