Digital News Journalist

Here are 4 ways to incorporate Docs into your reporting or writing routine. For the purposes of simplicity, I’m focusing these initial posts on Google Docs, but much of what is below applies to other Web-based software as well, including Zoho Docs.

1) Create an Online Notebook
Go to Docs.google.com and open a new Google Doc the next time you’re ready to take down some notes. There are times when pouring out thoughts or drawing ideas on paper is great, but for ordinary note-taking, digital writing has distinct advantages. It may feel odd at first to be opening a new browser window rather than launching Word or scrawling on a notepad. But when your notes and article drafts are online in Google Docs, your observations, transcripts and interview records are all magically searchable.

Here’s how that comes in handy. Let’s say you’re on the road away from your desk computer and need to look up a bit of information you got from someone you interviewed three months ago. Just open up docs on your phone browser, or any computer browser, and type in the person’s last name, or the place where you talked (or any other word you associate with that interview) in the Docs search box. It’s just as speedy as the Google.com box: up pops everything else in the note you’re looking for. Or if you prefer, find a note by sorting your docs by date, title, or folder. Trying to recall a quote from an interview last year where someone said something about Winston Churchill? Search for Churchill and up pops the key quote you want.

I use digital note-taking for phone interviews and for jotting notes at events, conferences, lectures and meetings. It saves a lot of time and frustration later on. It’s certainly a lot quicker to find a digital note than to flip through hundreds of pages of paper, trying to make out one’s own hurried handwriting, page after page. Just as Google’s Web search revolutionized the way journalists gather background information online, so should Google Docs – and other similar Web-based tools – shake up the way we create, manage and organize our reporting materials.

2) Organize Your Web Research

Collect links/data/info into a doc that you – or anyone else you want to invite – can update at any time. You can use this for a team reporting project, or for cutting and pasting research data you’re gathering into a centralized digital repository. Because Docs is Web-based, you can click the links later on to get back to the relevant sites, and you can link bits of text in one document to any other document you’ve created. For instance, I was recently preparing to interview someone I had spoken to once before, so I linked back to that earlier document in my prep notes.

3) Organize and Annotate Story Ideas
Maintain idea lists for story seeds. If you’re detail-oriented, use spreadsheet columns for research links, potential interview subjects, and relevant facts or stats. Or just write down a list of something in a plain vanilla document. Click here for an example of a simple list I started using Docs. To create it, I just started a Doc, typed in something, hit the “Share” button and made it publicly editable. Feel free to play around with this doc, and add something to get used to how easy it is to use.

Below is a similar sample list, using a Spreadsheet. The format was drawn, by the way, from Google’s growing repository of templates, which are free for anyone to use as a way of jump-starting a particular document.Click here to try editing this to see how it works. When you edit or add to the spreadsheet, your changes will be updated below:

4) Remotely Access and Edit Reporting Notes

Type up interviews or refine your draft from an airport computer kiosk, an Internet cafe, a home computer or wherever you are when you get a surprise call. I started this blog post on one computer, read it over on my iPhone, then finished it up on another computer. I never worried about which computer was where, or what browser or operating system I was using.

If you need some more help getting started, here’s a free e-book about Google Docs on Scribd.

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