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 and [...]
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 [...]
Crowdfunding, while not a tool in the technical sense, may turn out to be an indispensable business tool in the new ecosystem of journalism. While the idea of getting many people to donate small amounts of cash to fund a project is not new — charities do it, political campaigns do it — some forward-thinking journalists and entrepreneurs are starting to apply the same crowdfunding concept to the news.
Several Web sites offer – often for free – tools for managing and sharing large files (e.g. Mediafire, Megaupload, Box.net, YouSendIt, Drop.io, etc.). But, none have improved my workflow more than Dropbox.
Dance’s core philosophy of design is simple: Get out of the way of the content and create interactive graphics designed to keep viewers engaged.
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.