Digital News Journalist

Tech writeups often focus on the big guns: Apple, Google and Microsoft. But lots of little players offer great tools for journalists. One such small fry is Brooklyn-based Drop.io. The site offers a terrific solution for journalism collaboration.

Drop.io lets you set up free digital drop boxes – as many as you want – where you can share photos, documents, PDFs, videos, audio files and links with colleagues.

On the home page you start by naming your drop box or “drop.” (You don’t have to sign up, log-in, or provide any personal info at all). I’ve called the drop I created for this post “cunydnj,” as you can see in this screenshot. The next step is to select files to upload to your new, shared workspace. Or just create the drop to use later.

You get 100mb of storage for free for each drop you create, which is enough to upload lots of photos, documents, PDFs, audio files, links and whatever else you might be sharing. You can create as many free drops as you’d like.

I have several drops where I share teaching materials with students, including how-to tipsheets and audio and video tutorials. I have a couple drops I use for collaborative writing and multimedia projects. I store document drafts, interview transcripts and recordings, photos, and PDF research files. I also maintain drops for sharing personal photos and documents with friends. I access the drops online and from my iPhone, using a new free app called Droppler.

One of the nice things about drop.io is that once you create a shared workspace or “drop,” anyone can access it and add files to it, provided you’ve given them the URL, the e-mail address, or get this — the phone number. They don’t have to register or log-in, unless you’ve added a password to your drop. That ease of access means drops can be used for efficient crowdsourcing, enabling readers, viewers or blog visitors to contribute to the editorial team. Readers of a local blog, for instance, could call your drop’s phone number and record comments or story tips. Or they could send in community photos or videos by email.

If I were soliciting comments or contributions to this blog, for instance, I could ask you, the reader, to share your thoughts about drop.io by calling my new drop’s unique phone number, which in this case is: 917-512-7396 x 23506. Or you could contribute photos by attaching them to emails sent to cunydnj@drop.io. Once that content is in the drop, I can embed it into my blog. That means site producers can easily post crowdsourced voice messages, photos, videos or whatever else the community has contributed.

Anyone can log-in to a drop to see the shared materials (or to upload additional content) by visiting its URL. In the case of my new drop, which you can visit and try out as an example, the URL is: http://drop.io/cunydnj

If you prefer your drop to be private, you can require visitors to use a password. Each drop has its own URL, generally http://drop.io/ followed by whatever name you give the drop when you create it. (You can also just use the default random letters and digits assigned when you first open the site).

If I want to use a drop for a collaborative journalism project, I can give colleagues the shared drop info and they can add to — or download from — the drop as we put together the project components. If I’m working with remote colleagues, I can even use the drop’s conference call number to set up a free conference call. An answer posted on GetSatisfaction.com/dropio says that the site’s conference call feature can theoretically handle an unlimited number of participants, but it’s been tested to work with 20. There are no fees or codes to use – participants just dial the conference number and extension.

Even if you don’t have a need for its collaborative power, drops are handy for backing up key files and enabling online access to them when you’re away.

A caveat: Drop.io is sometimes sluggish when uploading photos, audio files and videos. And if you’re using a drop primarily for multimedia, you may bump into the 100mb space ceiling. You can upgrade to a 1gb drop for $10/year. Or if you plan to use drop.io professionally, you can subscribe to a pro version with 20 drops of 10gb each for $19/month.

There’s lots more to the site. For instance, it allows you to:

1. Collaborate in real-time on your project with chat and presentation modes.
2. Receive faxes in your drop
3. Set up optional charges for access to premium drop content (A potential revenue source for a struggling local blog?)
4. Automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, SMS or email when new files are added.
5. Download all your drop files to your computer as a Zip file
6. Move files from one drop to another

Oh, and about that “.io” in the site’s name? Here’s how the founders explain it on their FAQ page:

‘.io’ is the Top Level Domain for the British Indian Ocean Territory… yah, we had no idea either until we were poking around wikipedia. We are using it because: 1. We see our role primarily is as a really simple In/Out switch for all your information 2. The British Indian Ocean Territory is an enormous expanse of water with lots of islands in it, which, at a stretch, we think is a good metaphor for our site…”

Please add your comments below about drop.io or other journalism file sharing tools.

A video introduction to Drop.io: