He helped develop the WSJ‘s iPad app, one of the first from a major newspaper. But he also has some serious journalism chops: Ho has covered national consumer affairs for the AP and reported on telecom and terrorism for Cox Newspapers. In the latest installment of Mediabistro’s So What Do You Do? series, he gives advice to aspiring mobile editors and tells how news orgs should approach new technology.

“A lot of news skills only come with experience. I love it when folks can do Photoshop and the like, but more than any one kind of expertise, it’s important to have a general and deep technology comfort level and interest. This is all moving so fast, you have to adapt daily, hourly. It’s as much about making news decisions as it is troubleshooting tech problems. You need to be able to talk to developers as much as you talk to reporters and editors. You need a foot in each world, editorial and technology.”

For more, read So What Do You Do, David Ho, Mobile and Tablets Editor at The Wall Street Journal?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The social media team at The Wall Street Journal might beg to disagree. In an innovative piece of social journalism, WSJ reporters and editors are using Facebook’s Timeline tool to cover Facebook’s initial public offering.

The news org has created a new Facebook page, www.facebook.com/GoesPublic, using Timeline to not only chronicle its IPO roadshow but to also tell the history of Facebook.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Recently, the venerable news organization started experimenting with how to use Pinterest and created a Quotes board. Its description partially reads: “Editors are pinning memorable quotes appearing in The Wall Street Journal.”

Each pin is an image of a quote from a recent WSJ story shown floating over a column of blurred out text, much like pull-quotes do in an actual story. A short description accompanies each pin, allowing the quote to stand alone. By clicking on an individual quote, readers/pinners are taken to the original story it was published in.

“There are so many memorable soundbites out there,” said Brian Aguilar, a social media editor at the news organization who helped come up with the idea for the board. ”This gives you the opportunity to really highlight them and pique people’s interest in a story.”

This board can easily be replicated in newsrooms everywhere. I spoke (via email) with Aguilar to learn more about the board’s inspiration, how the images are created, and why the WSJ team isn’t worried about Pinterest and copyright issues.  continued…

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You may remember an article from The Wall Street Journal earlier this year which talked about the lucrativeness of selling video scoops directly to media outlets. The company at the center of this article was Citizenside, a French company created in 2006. Since then, the company has grown by leaps and bounds, most notably because of a 2007 partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP), one of the three largest news agencies in the world. This year, Citizenside also released their new smartphone app which lets users capture video and photos and upload them directly to the Citizenside website.

Citizenside’s global news coverage is the focus of their service. Most of the stories are based around events in Europe, with a good number of stories from Asia, North America, and South America. Members can add videos and photos directly from the Citizenside website, or they can use the Citizenside mobile apps. You can share your news images with Citizenside’s online community of global citizen reporters, leave comments, and share media to your social networks. Active members can also earn points for their submissions. The more your photo or video is seen, ranked, or commented, the more points you can earn. The highest ranked members of the month are featured on a monthly leaderboard.

Perhaps the largest benefit for joining and posting news to Citizenside is their commission program. Citizenside acts as a sales agent for their extensive network of print and online news outlets (300 in France and 7,000 internationally), and members can receive up to a 60% return on media sold to these outlets. Payment is delivered to members via PayPal within 60 days, and Citizenside maintains an exclusive three-month publishing license once media is uploaded to their service. If you are a buyer for a media agency and want to use any of the photos or videos offered on Citizenside, check out Citizenside Pro for more information.

Citizenside is currently available on both iOS and Android for free. Keep up with the Citizenside team by visiting them at http://www.citizenside.com/, or by following them on Facebook or Twitter.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the short amount of time since WSJ Live launched — barely three weeks ago — the interactive video news app from The Wall Street Journal has already skyrocketed to the top of the charts at Apple’s App Store and been hailed as a “milestone product.” This is making the editors at the Journal very happy.

The app brings live video coverage from the paper’s editorial staff to readers via the iPad, Internet-ready TVs and set-top boxes. Even better, the app is free. (For more, see the profile our sister site FishbowlNY posted.)

“This is a beast we want to feed,” said Neil McIntosh, deputy editor of the Journal‘s Europe edition. “WSJ Live is a big, big step journalistically and editorially.” continued…

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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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.