tools - 10,000 Words

This Handy Tool Separates Journalism from Press Releases

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:30:42 +0000

Everyone has been in contact with lazy journalism — whether its one article looking a bit too full of market-speak or a group of articles using the same descriptive terms — but it’s always been very difficult to suss out whether it’s a coincidence or a purposeful cut-and-paste job. Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit focusing on governmental transparency, has decided to tackle the problem head-on with its new website, Churnalism.

If you think a particular article looks, well, suspicious, simply paste the link’s URL or the text directly into Churnalism’s free scanner (or add on a free browser extension) and the tool will match phrases to press releases within its database. The tool scans through many popular PR hubs, including PR Newswire and MarketWire, and it has also revealed it can grab text from Wikipedia and the US government’s websites. You can compare the article side-by-side and see what was lifted from source material — and whether it’s taken out of context.

Check out the video on Churnalism below. continued…

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5 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Journalists

Lauren Hockenson — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:00:35 +0000

It’s no secret that one of the keys to being a successful journalist these days is mastering the art of combing the Internet. And, a large portion of finding great stuff on the Internet relies on properly and efficiently utilizing clever tools that elevates your online skills from “great” to “practically superhuman.”

Chrome is now the most popular Internet browser, and for plenty of good reason: in addition to having a straightforward search bar and integration with all of Google’s great tools (auto-complete in the browser!), users can customize their web experience with a host of add-ons. These add-ons, called “extensions” by the browser itself, can do amazing things — and boost your reporting abilities to make you more organized, connected, and efficient.

Here are five extensions that are popular for their great utility in any journalist’s arsenal, and they are all absolutely free to download.

What’s your favorite Chrome extension? Let us know in the comments.

OneTab

Reporters everywhere are singing the praises of OneTab because it beautifully solves one of the biggest pain points for online journalists: the agonizing slow-down of a computer once it crosses its maximum threshold for open browser tabs. If you tend to have dozens and dozens of tabs open at any given time, this extension will speed up your computer without losing all of your hard-earned tabs. continued…

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Two-Step Verification: Why It’s Necessary for Journalists

Lauren Hockenson — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:39:58 +0000

This week, Apple finally announced support for two-step verification for both the iCloud and AppleID. Now, users must use a second device to input a special code in order to access account specifics and iTunes purchases. It may seem like a small, or even unnecessary step, but type as fast as you can to implement it now.

Two-step verification is important for everyone, but it’s especially important for journalists. Implement it now, or risk losing your online identity forever.

One of the hottest stories concerning online privacy and hacking of journalists happened just last year, when Wired‘s Mat Honan was the target of hackers. In one fell swoop, the hackers broke into his gMail, his Twitter and his AppleID, erasing the memory of all of his devices and holding all of his social media hostage. After a thorough investigation, Honan found out that the hackers were able to do all of this simply by calling up Amazon and Apple’s customer service to break into his account, and follow back his daisy chain of email accounts to break into the rest of his life.

So how does two-step verification factor into Honan’s earth-shattering problem? continued…

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‘For Journalism’: News Developers Launch A Kickstarter To Raise Money To Teach Data Journalism For All

Lauren Rabaino — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 05:00:21 +0000

A new Kickstarter campaign kicked off this weekend with a goal of raising $32,000 to create educational tools for the “next generation of news-application developers.” If they reach their goal, these are the first eight courses they’ll teach:

Django, taught by Jeremy Bowers of The Washington Post
Information Management, taught by Christopher Groskopf of NPR
Ruby on Rails, taught by Jeff Larson of ProPublica
DevOps, taught by Jacqui Maher of The New York Times
Charting and Visualization, taught by Michelle Minkoff of The Associated Press
Responsive Design, taught by Ryan Pitts of The Spokesman Review
Mapping, taught by Ken Schwenke of The LA Times
Cybersecurity and Online Privacy, taught by Mike Tigas of The Spokesman Review

It’s a lofty goal and a huge commitment from each instructor, seeing as they each have day jobs at high-profile news organizations. The great Dave Stanton will be the ringleader of the group, overseeing day-to-day outreach and helping the instructors stay on goal.

The mission of this project is admirable, and would be one of the best educational resources out there for journalists. Each course contains an ebook, screencasts, code repositories and forums.

Pledging to their campaign comes with benefits:

$5+: You’ll get a Twitter shoutout
$20+: Access to one topic of your choosing
$100+: Access to seven topics of your choosing
$110+: Every course in the batch plus a t-shirt
$500+: Access to all materials for a team of 10
$10,000+: All university students/staff get access, plus help strategizing around integration

Donate here.

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10 ‘Budget Balancer’ Tools And Games From Newsrooms Worldwide

Lauren Rabaino — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:15:09 +0000

As legislative sessions start to kick off in states around the country, newsrooms will undoubtedly be looking for ways to cover various negotiations and budget crises. The idea of a “budget balancing” game is nothing new — lots of newsrooms have tried it — but many have taken their own conceptual approaches. Here are a few different examples:

1. New York Times – Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget

This approach lets users select multiple options (tax increases and spending cuts) then watch on a scale how much money those decisions make in the short-term and longterm. You can read more about the methodology on the Economix blog.

Best feature: See impacts on both the short-term and long-term

2. LA Times — California Budget Balancer

The LA Times first lets you select a starting point based on how much you’d spend on public schools, and from there, you can granularly reduce or eliminate funding in other areas using a slider. As you make decisions, you watch the remaining deficit drop. Unlike the NYT approach, the LA Times lets the user have more control over the values inputted, rather than basing it off real-life proposals.

Best feature: When you’ve come to a proposal you’re happy with, you can see your breakdown for where money is allocated, then share it on social media. continued…

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Quick! Pick Up These Helpful iPhone Apps Still On Sale

Lauren Hockenson — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 17:01:04 +0000

As a journalist, the only thing better than a piece of new equipment is a piece of new equipment for a rock-bottom price. Everyone is doing more with less these days, so it’s more important than ever to take advantage of sales that will boost your toolset without breaking the bank.

Luckily, those doldrum days between Christmas and New Years have become a boon for people who are looking for a good deal, and you can see that phenomenon no better than in the Apple app store. Whether you’re taking advantage of a new device or interested in updating your apps, these four products will become your go-to for on-the-fly reporting and task management — and might make you a better reporter in the process. continued…

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TubeChop for Journalism: How a YouTube Clip-Selector Can Help You (and Your Readers)

Kevin Loker — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:02:41 +0000

My favorite part of the comment section of YouTube is the ability to link a timestamp (say “0:31″) to a particular point in a video, letting someone just click on the “0:31″ in blue and see, in full, the point you’re referencing.

It’s a great way of adding context to your comment, but unfortunately, it currently only works in the comment section itself. Discussing the contexts of a particular moment in YouTube videos, however, can also be advantageous for your journalism.

In my searching for other possibilities to add video context to journalism, I stumbled upon TubeChop—I suggest you give it a try.

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Create Interactive Infographics with Easel.ly and (Then) ThingLink

Kevin Loker — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:10:32 +0000

A reader (and fun Tweeter) had a smart idea following our post last week on using ThingLink creatively in journalism. I had to pass it along.

One of the ideas laid out in that post was how to quickly make infographics interactive, adding another meta-layer to the data you already made look pretty. Ivan Lajara, engagement editor for Digital First Media’s East Region, had an idea to make that even simpler:

.@kevinloker I was thinking that Thinglink + Easel.ly just might be the thing

— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) October 1, 2012

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5 Ideas for ThingLink’d Journalism

Kevin Loker — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:26:22 +0000

Interactives can easily take time, resources and skill-sets that not every newsroom (or individual journalist) has. For those situations, ThingLink is simple tool that anyone can pick up and use today (or, really, right now) and create an engaging experience that helps tell a story.

We’ve written about ThingLink before, but as more notable newsroom uses pop up, it’s worth again walking through where its strengths lay.

To do that recap: take a look at this interactive image that former contributor Elana Zak, now social media producer for The Wall Street Journal, used as an example in our previous piece. It was inspired by this tagged image by Berliner Morgenpost. Hover over the dots.

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Top 25 Most Popular Apps For Freelancers

Meranda Watling — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 23:39:15 +0000

When it comes to software and apps to help them work, it’s no surprise freelancers like free apps. But here’s another non-surprise from a recent survey of about 100 freelancers conducted by BestVendor: They also love cloud computing. Most of the top 25 most popular apps from that survey were a combination of both.

Check out BestVendor's infographic to learn more about the survey and see a few of their respondents' also-rans that didn't make the main list this time. Click the image to see the full size version.

In its survey due to be released Thursday, the New York-based start-up site aimed at connecting users with useful apps and software found not one of the top 25 most popular apps cited by the freelancers was a desktop-only program. Some of them have desktop components, but most were cloud-based apps or sites.

So what were the pack leaders? Well, if this were the Olympics, let’s just say Google would be the medal leader in this event, with seven of the top 25 apps the freelancers cited — more than a quarter of the list, including two of the top three. Yet, it didn’t take the No. 1 spot: File sharing and backup service Dropbox bested the big G for that honor.

Beyond file storage and email, several of the tools were directly related to the business aspects of working as a freelancer, with software to help manage projects, invoices, billing and budgeting.

To be fair, the demographics of the relatively small sample of freelancers surveyed about what software and apps they use to manage their work was skewed a bit: 44 percent worked in technology and digital media according to BestVendor. Also, primarily they were based in the U.S. and Europe. But this is still an interesting list of ideas for freelancers looking to add primarily free tools to their tool box.

In rank order, the 25 most popular freelancer tools are:
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Should I Animate That? 5 Questions for Animated GIFs in Journalism

Kevin Loker — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:49:12 +0000

If you’ve seen this coverage of an emotional Olympics race on Buzzfeed or this guide of gymnastic detail on The Atlantic Wire, you’ve recently seen some nifty animated GIFs in journalism.

(Note: I didn’t say GIFs about journalism, like these news cats. Hopefully you’ve already seen those.)

The success of GIF-infused content in actual news content has some media circles buzzing around a longtime internet graphic capability: “Is this an overlooked tool, or just a fad?, “Are we Buzzfeedifying maintsream news orgs, or is that a silly question now?”, and “should journalists embrace them, or are they somehow detrimental to the craft?”

They aren’t all simple questions, and I don’t have answers. (I actually posed questions here, too.) But I can comfortably say there are indeed reasons the animated GIF can work well to tell a story online.

Likewise, there are reasons it may not.

Putting other debates aside, here are five simpler questions for journalists to consider on a case-by-case basis before using an animated GIF to help digitally tell your story. continued…

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‘7 Habits’ (and Tools) for Highly Effective Journalists

Kevin Loker — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:50:35 +0000

Headlines following the recent passing of Stephen R. Covey have mostly included reference to the management and self-help guru’s immensely successful book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The permeant reference is with good reason: the book was on The New York Times best seller list for more than five years, and it’s sold over 25 million copies to date. As I reflected on the best way to manage my own career, I couldn’t help but think about how Covey’s book probably had good insight in its pages for me, too — a journalist who fights the demands of an always-on news cycle, yes, but also a person. A normal human being.

Journalists are people, too. Here are some takeaways for how Covey’s seven habits can apply to our field, along with some practical tools and strategies to begin making them your habits, too. continued…

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Infogr.am: Another Web-based Tool For Creating Beautiful Infographics

Lauren Rabaino — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:47:05 +0000

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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Create Social and Interactive Images With ThingLink

Elana Zak — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:13:20 +0000

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Imagine then an image tagged with YouTube videos, audio from SoundCloud, tweets, photos from Flickr, songs from iTunes, Wikipedia pages and even links to e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay.

In just a few, painless clicks, ThingLink lets users do just that. After creating an account and logging in, the site lets you easily upload images from Facebook, Flickr, a website or your computer and then tag the pictures with rich media content. You don’t have to leave the page you’re on — all the content is embedded within the photo.

See how news organizations could have used ThingLink with this well-known photograph. (Just hover your mouse over the dots.)

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15 Newsroom Tools From CIR’s TechRaking Conference

Lauren Rabaino — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:30:42 +0000

The Googleplex where TechRaking was held.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — About 200 journalists and techies gathered at the Googleplex yesterday to try to find a more perfect union between muckrakers and technologists at first-ever TechRaking conference. One of the common themes: If we have to do more with less, then technology has to make up the difference. That means we need more tools to help us do things more efficiently.

Albert Sun, a New York Times programmer, captures the problem in a blog post:

A lot of effort at journalism innovation has been focused around the product that our readers experience. People are doing great things to take advantage of the new storytelling forms and new ways of engaging with people that the web browser and the internet have made possible.

But I want to turn some attention to the opposite side of things. What about all the myriad tasks that lead up to writing and producing a story that represent most of the work that a reporter does? Where is the innovation that makes that work faster and easier?

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