I have long been fascinated by The Voice of San Diego, a membership-based investigative news site in Southern California. Their model is one from which many news organizations can learn — they were doing memberships long before paywalls were cool, they understand the importance of covering specific niches in a community, they have a strong focus on watchdog investigations, and they’ve always made reader engagement core to their journalism. Today, the organization has relaunched its website with new software that uses technology to help amplify those goals. They realized that their old CMS was holding them back, and relaunched a spiffy new design in a move from which the rest of us in the new industry could surely learn (but I’m biased).

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When a potential employer Googles your name, you want your website — complete with all your best articles, social media profiles, videos and other work — to be the first thing that shows up.

An online portfolio is the new first impression and you want yours to be a strong one.

This doesn’t mean you have to b a web designer or someone who can code in their sleep. Luckily, more and more sites are popping up that make collecting your clips in one place and creating an online portfolio as easy as 1-2-3.

Here are five sites to visit if you are in the market to create your own online portfolio. They all offer the ability to create a customizable URL, are free (unless you choose the paid version), and don’t require you to know any code. The most work you’ll have to do is click the mouse or trackpad. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

MediaPass, a subscription manager for websites, announced that it has raised $1.75 million in series B funding. Established to offer monetization solutions for online content, MediaPass offers web publishers, big or small, a simple way to implement paid content models. While developing and applying a paywall can be complicated and time consuming, users of MediaPass simply need to copy and paste a few lines of code. The service is highly customizable, and allows users the options of metered paywalls and choosing specific content that requires subscriptions. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the demo, you can select different users from a dropdown to see their various contributions and deletions in the document. You can toggle between showing/hiding changes.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

More than a year ago, I told you about six must-have WordPress plugins for newsrooms. But as technology would have it, a lot has changed since then — new social tools, new meta tags, new versions of WordPress.  Here are a few more plugins I’d add to that original (and still relevant) list.

Storify

This week Storify launched a WordPress plugin that lets you curate and embed social media straight from the WordPress dashboard. All you have to do is drop in the URL to a Storify page and it will be embedded in your post. Before, dropping in the javascript embed code caused the code to get lost if a blogger was switching between visual and HTML editors. No longer! The one downside: It doesn’t currently support customization options like using the slideshow template or removing the header from embed. Hopefully that’s coming in a future version.

Google Standout

At the Online News Association conference in 2011, Google announced a new meta tag for publishers to use that would allow them to identify stellar enterprise content. This plugin lets you specify posts that should use that meta tag, as well as additional options for publisher meta tags like original-source and syndication-source.  continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There’s the beautiful, HTML 5 Twenty Eleven default theme. There’s the different post formats.

Then there’s the refreshed dashboard that includes a full screen editor function.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Whether you’re blogging for your news organization or are a freelancer representing yourself, blogging from the field has never been easier. If you’re using WordPress.com (not the self-hosted version, although there are similar solutions for WordPress.org users), here are a few tricks for your phone or tablet to help make you better at what you do.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Clean and simple blogging interface: According to Google’s blog, “The post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work.” The whole UI of the post editor is fresher and much easier to use.
• Integrated stats: Blogger’s Dashboard now offers a snapshot of Google Analytics for bloggers to better understand and grow their target audiences.
• Recommended blogs: Google is renowned for their creepily accurate recommendations, and now the Dashboard will recommend blogs you may be interested in based on your blog’s content.

Blogger’s new look comes at a time when Google is redesigning a large portion of their products to keep with a unified user experience. What do you think of the redesign?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A few weeks ago, we covered 7 great free WordPress themes for journalists that put the focus on your content while taking the guesswork out of choosing the right design.

So what’s the difference in using a premium WordPress theme aside from the price? For starters, support and compatibility. Purchasing a premium WordPress theme ensures that you will have a direct channel of contact to the theme designer to answer any technical questions, and the theme you purchased will have been tested thoroughly in all of the major browsers. Premium WordPress themes may often come with a guarantee for free updates, increased admin options, and the opportunity to download multiple themes if you purchase from a theme club like WooThemes or NattyWP.

Here are a few premium WordPress themes I’ve found that are great for journalists to feature text, photos, or video. If there’s any premium theme that you’ve seen on the Web which would also be great for journalists, let us know in the comments!

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We’ve covered WordPress quite extensively here at 10,000 Words, including must-have plugins and a workflow for running your news site using WordPress and Google Docs. It’s extremely important for every journalist to have a portfolio online which profiles their work, and WordPress makes it extremely simple to do this. Another great selling point for WordPress is the ability to switch up the design of your site on a whim using a theme, transforming it from a mere blog into a real showcase. Here are seven WordPress themes below which I think are great for journalists and emphasize content with a professional design.

Oh, and they’re free too! Is there a great WordPress theme for journalists which you like? Let us know below in the comments.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The video embedded above is a screencast from Davis, which outlines the new editorial workflow.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I recently did an email interview with Tracey Taylor (@tktaylor), a co-founder of Berkeley’s news startup, Berkeleyside, to find out what it takes to start your own news organization.

A few notable points from that exchange:

• Berkeleyside was founded in October 2009 by Lance Knobel, Frances Dinkelspiel, and Tracey Taylor who all have backgrounds as editors and writers.
• The site is run on WordPress
• Their main revenue stream is advertising (and they’re starting to build membership revenue)
• After 18 months of existence, the founders have only recently begun to pay themselves a “very modest monthly salary”
• Berkelyside.com currently has 117,660 unique visitors monthly
• The Berkeleyside iPhone app calls for user contributions by allowing community members to submit photos from the scene of news events
• Three trips Taylor offers to others wanting to start a local news site: do it your way, keep it lean and be transparent

The following Q&A covers everything from inspiration for founding the site, to business challenges, to technical details, to tips for others wanting to start a news site. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last year, the Online Journalism Blog brought you 85 plugins for blogging journalists. I’ve narrowed my own selection down to six plugins, not necessarily for individual journo-bloggers, but for any newsroom with an active WordPress install — whether it be a full site, or a niche blog.

1. WinerLinks

Paragraph-level permalinks should be natively built into the web, but since they’re not, WinerLinks is the interim solution. WinerLinks is a plugin that adds an anchor to the end of each paragraph, which serves as a permalink to that particular paragraph. You can see the concept in action on sites like Dave Winer’s Scripting News (the inspiration behind the plugin’s name) and PressThink. Even Om Malik is using the plugin on his personal blog.

If readers want to be able to reference a particular part of your post, they can point to the permalink. Later, if a writer wants to point back to a quote used by a specific person in a specific post, pointing directly the paragraph is brainless. The more context you can provide to your readers, the better.

Disclosure: The creation of this plugin partially unfolded on my personal blog after designing PressThink.

2. Matt’s Community Tags

You may remember Mark’s post last week about photo tagging as journalism’s next big social experiment. Well now you can manage your own photo tagging through a very early-release WordPress plugin created by Matt Mullenweg himself, called Matt’s Community Tags.

From the plugin description: “Very beta, in this version the intention is for this to allow a moderated community to assist in tagging primarily photographic content, image attachments and such.”

Hat tip to Automattic’s Andrew Spittle for pointing me to this one

3. EditFlow

EditFlow helps you streamline your editorial workflow within WordPress by expanding upon native WordPress features, turning WordPress into a comprehensive content management system for newsroom processes. For example, take a look at how the plugin lets you manipulate the simple statuses feature within WordPress:

Here are the full list of features:

• Custom statuses
• Editorial comments
• Email notifications
• Usergroups
• Calendar
• Editorial metadata
• Story budget

Disclosure: I was involved with the organization that originally built this, but am pretty far removed now.

4. Feedback by Paragraph

Although this plugin could use some updates, it’d be useful for a newsroom or blog to experiment with. Similar to WinerLinks paragraph-level breakdown, Feedback by Paragraph allows users to give comments at the paragraph level. Adapted from NewsMixer, it adds a new level of accountability and could be an interesting way to view reader sentiment toward a story based on how much feedback is given to each paragraph (for example, a point of controversy or an error would could be obviously called out simply by the mass amount of comments associated with a certain part of a story).

From the plugin website, it’s great for:

• Leaving corrections and clarifications on any blog
• On a news site or blog you can let your users suggest other areas of interest and investigation.
• Document annotation – each post could be a chapter of a book or document.

5. Assignment Desk

Assignment Desk,an open source project out of NYU, was created specifically for news organizations using WordPress as their primary content management system. Rather than being only an internal tool like EditFlow, Assignment Desk makes community engagement an intergated part of the editorial workflow.

Assignment Desk overview from Matt Diaz on Vimeo.

From the plugin description: “Once story ideas have been approved, Assignment Desk allows users to participate in the reporting of a particular story. An editor may assign specific roles (e.g. photographer, writer) to the user as well as limit those eligible to contribute by user type (e.g. first time contributor, regular contributor, professional journalist).

The plugin allows community members to submit tips or story ideas to the news organization, and volunteer to help with the story in various ways, while preserving editorial oversight.”

6. Custom Metadata Manager

From a creator of Edit Flow comes yet another way to structure your data within WordPress: Custom Metadata Manager. This plugin allows you to create custom metadata fields to go with different post types. So, for example, you could create a “movie” post type with fields like “release date” and “rating” or a “sports” post type with fields like “location” and “score.”

From the plugin description: “The goal of this plugin is to help you rapidply build familiar, intuitive interfaces for your users in a very WordPress-native way.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With more and more people turning to Android phones, here are some useful apps for journalists. All are free and available from the Android Market.

1. Live video: Qik

Qik was given a positive review on this blog back in May, and the Android version of this app is an excellent way to broadcast live from breaking news, very fast. New features are added frequently and the quality of the video continues to improve. But a word of warning: Be sure to keep an eye on your battery life! Qik drains batteries very fast.

2. Blogging: WordPress for Android

WordPress for Android is a solid app that’s perfect for a breaking news situation. It’s fast, and has robust posting and comment moderation features. Users can even upload photos and videos to accompany their posts. WordPress for Android works for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted) blogs. Users of WordPress.com stats can also view their traffic numbers remotely through the app. Remember: Blogging on a phone is harder than it sounds, so be sure to check your work before hitting the post button!

3. Photo editing: Photoshop Express

As the quality of the cameras on Android phones continues to improve (the new DROID X has an 8 megapixel camera), it’s essential to have access to photo editing software on the go. Photoshop Express for Android lets you crop, tone and add a few fun filters and borders to your pictures. While it’s no substitute for Photoshop CS5, Photoshop Express is a great tool to use before sharing your mobile picture on your blog or Twitter.

4. Audio recording: VoiceTask

Forget your voice recorder at home? No worries, because VoiceTask is a free and easy-to-use voice recording app. VoiceTask users can enter their e-mail address in the app’s settings page and receive an e-mailed MP3 recording. Remember, the recordings will sound like a phone conversation, since you’re using the microphone from a phone. But for casual, transcription purposes, VoiceTask definitely will work well.

5. Note taking: Evernote for Android

Every journalist needs to take notes, and Evernote is the perfect application if you ever get sick of your reporter’s notebook. Not only can you use Evernote to take text notes, but you can also upload pictures and audio. The best part is that Evernote stores your data in the cloud, meaning the notes from your Android phone are readily available on the Evernote desktop app (Windows and Mac) or website. An added bonus: Evernote lets you tag each of your notes, helping you stay organized.

Know of any good Android apps for journalists not mentioned here? Share your favorites in the comments!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.