One of the nice things about Google’s Web-based software is that new features keep popping up even if you’re not paying a cent. This week the big news was Google Buzz. More on that once the dust settles. Meanwhile, I’ve recently been testing three new Google Docs features. First, Docs now lets you upload, store [...]
Boil journalism down and you’re left with three stages: researching/reporting, writing/creating, and polishing/presenting. Thus the organization of these 33 essential sites for journalists, originally assembled for a three-part January Academy workshop at CUNY’s J-School. The first group of sites (1-11) focused on finding, managing and organizing info. The second group of sites (12-22) was all [...]
Publishing stories, polling thousands of people and building networks once required vast resources and a large, skilled team. Now any journalist with some basic Web tools can quickly do all of those things, reaching a global audience with little more than a laptop. The key is understanding the available tools. My previous post listed the [...]
The list-making season gave us Vadim Lavrusik’s smart 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist and John Thompson’s concise Ten Things Every Journalist Should Know in 2010. Poynter posted a lively list of 100 Things Journalists Should Never Do, and Adam Westbrook added a nice set of 10 Resolutions for Journalists in 2010. To round off [...]
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.
Now that you’re using Docs, how do you back-up all those files you’ve stored online? Google backs up your documents on multiple servers, and you can back-up your own docs in at least 4 different ways.
In a comment on a previous post, which was an introduction to Google Docs, Jay Rosen offered a good suggestion that I address the issue of document security. Journalists of all sorts – from those who are super techie to those who rely exclusively on paper notebooks – may justifiably wonder about the safety/privacy of Google documents. I have three thoughts about this.
When you start using Web-based software, suddenly all of the material you gather is accessible online from wherever you are. If you’re used to using a Google search to find info quickly on the Web, just imagine how convenient it can be to be able to find something from within your own past reporting and writing just as easily and quickly. No more digging through old drawers trying to locate a piece of paper with a number scrawled on it. Just open up Docs and search for any word, name or date range to find anything you’re looking for.
Google Docs is a suite of free, browser-based software that includes easy to use word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools akin to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The big difference between Docs and Microsoft Office is that your Google documents are stored online, so they’re accessible from anywhere you have Internet access.
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