• Care. There is nothing more important to your success at journalism—at anything—than caring. You don’t need to love every assignment you’re given, but you do need to want the product to reflect positively on you. If you don’t care, figure out why. Maybe you don’t like the topic (so you know not to look for jobs at places that focus on that topic). Maybe you aren’t comfortable with the medium (either find a different one to work in or practice until you are comfortable). Learning what you don’t like or care about is useful information for you.

• Use what you know. You probably consume more media than any other generation in history. If you stop and think about it, you know exactly what works and doesn’t work in journalism. There’s a reason you’ll stick around to read one site’s article lede-to-kicker but click off another site without scrolling down the page. When you’re the one creating, generate the former.
  
• Words like lede and kicker are an annoyance (as demonstrated above). Use them only to get through classes or newsrooms, never in your daily life.

• Execution counts. If you’re building a site, pitching a business idea, editing a video, whatever—how you pull it off matters. Sure, good content always trumps bad content, but good content coupled with style blows away good content with a bland presentation. The fonts you choose for title placards matter. The color scheme of your website matters. The timing of the edits in your video matter. Consider all aspects.

• Push boundaries. It’s good to know the rules. It’s bad to be constricted by them. There’s a reason so many people have read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” and it’s not because it was more of the same.

• Reach out to the people you look up to. I don’t like calling it networking—that makes it sound like work and a little cheap. If you are interested in something, reaching out to people who are good at that isn’t work as much as a desire to learn (social networks make this easier than ever). And follow up with them often. In my experience, they remember being where you are now.

• Immerse yourself in the best. Before every video shoot I went on, I would go to the site MediaStorm. The work there is visually appealing and powerful, and I wanted that in my mind when I went out. Find whatever you think is best and draw from it often.

• Procrastinate–sometimes. Okay, I’ve never seen anyone prescribe procrastination before.  But I have yet to meet a journalist who doesn’t wait until an hour before deadline to start pushing hard. Some traditions should live on—even in this “shifting journalistic environment.”

• Now stop procrastinating and go create something. Journalism’s shifting I hear. Be the ones that pace the change.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting Sunset Park Chronicled six months ago. Certain questions that plague the startup entrepreneurial journalist or blogger were easy to answer. It was a “hyperlocal” blog, so I had an audience—the neighborhood. Few news outlets cover this part of Brooklyn, and there is demand for news. And I knew my subject well. It is my “beat” at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Getting a blog up and running is easy as well. I started with Wordpress.com, which is free, and offers good looking, flexible templates.

Then comes the learning curve and the growing pains. As an individual trying to cover a large and complex community, I don’t have the luxury of taking off one hat and putting on another. I wear them all at once–I aggregate news and I write it. I fix funky links and embed video. On occasion, I editorialize.

I do it imperfectly. Nobody really knows what the news landscape will look like in ten years, or even tomorrow. We do know it’s changing. Anyone can make news, and report it. This is what I have learned:

• Be consistent. Whether weekly, twice a week, or every day, make sure to set a blogging schedule and keep to it. Remember that morning paper that once landed on your doorstep? People like to know they can find something new when they go to your site and these days, people are hungry for as many updates as you can serve up. While a flurry of updates is always nice, consistency and quality pay off in the long run.
• Take a picture. Or a video. Or make a map. Try to create an interactive environment. Get people involved, even if only through watching and clicking.
• Use tags and pingbacks. Tag those posts like the A-train in the ‘80s. Tags help direct traffic. People still fish for news erratically, and you want to catch them in your net.
• Learn search engine optimization. Painful as it is, clever headlines are quickly becoming a thing of the past. You have to put key terms in the headline—like the tags, it helps put you on the radar of Google, Bing and the like. Save your quips for the lede.
• Talk to people. Respond to your readers. Ask questions. Engage thoughtfully with critics to create good dialogue, but don’t get defensive. And don’t take things personally. Doing so tends to take everyone off topic.
• Make a comments policy, and stick to it. You need to figure out what you are willing to put up there. My policy was to  write back to commenters asking them to remove offensive language, but I chose not to do it myself. If they’re not willing to reword their comment to get the idea up there, then it was likely a fleeting thing.
• Use the blog for story ideas. I have learned a lot from writing back to commenters asking them for more. Some speak on the record, some off. Some don’t respond at all, but you never know what you will find until you reach out.
• Shameless blog promotion. A news blog provides a service, an articulation of goings-on and issues, but it can’t work properly if no one’s reading it. Use Twitter. Tell people about the blog in person (gasp!). Then let the viral nature of word of mouth do its work.
• Use your analytics, but not too much. As an editor/publisher/marketer, stats are key. You can get a sense of who is looking and when, and what they want to read and like to look at. I originally used the data embedded into wordpress.com. Now I use Google Analytics, which offers a wealth of information, some of it still opaque to me. That said, there are stories, good stories, important stories that will never get the traffic that a cute cat video on YouTube pulls in an hour. That’s okay. Cute cat coverage does not a good reporter make.
• Be transparent. Don’t pretend you are something you are not. You are helping people understand their environment better. Let them see who’s talking.
• Link. For the love of god, link. Show people where you get your information. You are an educator as much as a reporter. Help them see how the job is done. You’ll build trust and credibility, hot commodities in our information age.
• Use your resources. One of my favorites is Google Alerts. It keeps me abreast of news and blogs, and offers story ideas. Twitter works too. And there is, of course, nothing like shoe leather reporting. It’s the best part anyway.
• Do your best. Life is busy. The news is fast. Blogging is a huge responsibility. Learn how to balance it all to keep quality high, readers interested and stay sane. Technical issues can be fixed, typos corrected, but a stain on your journalistic credibility is harder to clean up.

Tracking audio changes assume that louder scenes (explosions, musical crescendos, shouting) correspond to higher levels of drama. Rapid visual changes (quick motion across the screen, camera motion, or rapid edits) also correspond to action, a quicker tempo, and higher levels of drama. A combined index of audio and visual changes graphed over the length of the movie represents its unique fingerprint, revealing its dramatic highs and lows.

I analyzed forty noteworthy movies and collected the results in this interactive tool. Use it to explore the dramatic profiles for each movie and their corresponding scenes. Do the highest peaks in each profile match the movie’s climactic moments?

Explore the Story Analysis tool, which was used to produce the graphs. Use it to see how each movie’s audio and visuals are analyzed in real-time. You can analyze your own movies (FLV or MP4 format), output the data, and post the results for others to see.

How it was done
First, all the movies had to be converted to the correct Flash-friendly format. Each movie was converted to an MP4 (H.264 codec) file using Handbrake, a free open-source video transcoder. Then I had each movie stream into Flash with the FLVPlayer component.

Tracking the audio changes

Audio levels were analyzed with the ActionScript command, SoundMixer.computeSpectrum(). The command takes a snapshot of the current sound and stores the information as a series of numbers that can be translated visually. While my sound visualization is rather simple, there are countless creative ways to visualize sound. There have even been contests for the most creative visualizations. Since I was most interested in the variation of sound levels throughout the movie, I captured the amplitude (or volume) of the sound every 10 milliseconds and graphed it with a gray line. An average of the sound amplitude was calculated and graphed with a bold white line.

Tracking the visual changes

Every 10 milliseconds, Flash grabbed the image from the video stream with the BitmapData class. The command, getPixel(), gathered the red, green, and blue color information from each pixel. The red, green, and blue color distribution of an image is known as an RGB histogram. My goal was to track changes between histograms that would indicate major visual changes due to camera motion, edits, or subject motion. Much research has been already done on the subject of tracking shot changes for video cataloging, involving complex (and patented) algorithms. I made my calculation quite simple, determined by differences in the histogram area coupled with a dampening function to normalize the extreme values. The resulting index, which reflects visual changes, was graphed as a gray line. An average of the index was calculated and graphed as a bold white line.

Combining audio and visual changes

Combining the audio and visual indices resulted in what I termed, the “drama index”, a measure of the dramatic highs and lows in a movie. The overall shape of the profile, shown in red, can be interactively smoothed out or made more detailed by changing its resolution in the Story Analysis tool.

What does your favorite movie look like?
Analysis of forty distinguished movies–the top ten of all time, the worst ten, the ten highest grossing films, and the previous ten Best Pictures–not surprisingly reveal no common pattern, but it does provide a standard, objective way of tracking a film’s dramatic peaks and valleys–their position, duration, and intensity. This screenshot is a profile of Star Wars. Note the dramatic beginning when Princess Leia’s vessel is boarded, and the slow build-up to the three dramatic peaks at the end: the rescue from the Death Star, the duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and finally the destruction of the Death Star. The analysis works best on modern action films. There is, of course, no consideration for acting, for cinematography, or for the dramatic climaxes that may come in quieter moments (such as the sudden change that crosses an actor’s face with a revelation).

Other movie visualizations
There are many other interesting visualizations of movies. NetFlix recently ran a contest to see if the public could find a more effective way to predict which movies users would prefer based on past ratings. The results of two of the top teams can be visualized as a network of similarities between movies, or as a landscape with similar movies clustered together. (Based on these maps, if you liked Star Wars, then you probably also liked RoboCop).

One recent visualization cleverly plotted the interactions between characters. The hand-drawn map and synthesis of time and geography reminds me a little of Charles Minard’s map of Napolean’s march to Moscow, as discussed and praised by Edward Tufte as a gem of information design.

Finally, the New York Times produced a fascinating look at the box-office revenues of the movies. I love seeing the periodicity in the graph reflecting the predictable huge bumps during the summer blockbuster months and holiday season before the Oscar considerations. Notice also the relatively short, squatter profiles of recent movies compared to the long tails of movies in the past.

What more can we visualize of movies, or the structure of individual stories?

The plan is to build on The Times’ work, which first launched in the spring 2009, and to make it more scalable, generating greater community contributions and involvement. (Read more about the project here.

Jere Hester, director of the J-School’s award-winning NYCity News Service, and I just kicked off a Hyperlocal news course that will help feed The Local with news posts and collaborative projects.

Our goal, however, is not just to have ten students cranking out copy for The Local. We’ll take this collaboration as an opportunity to innovate Hyperlocal coverage on a platform that has growing traffic and momentum to make these Hyperlocal projects meaningful to people living in Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill.

We won’t keep the lessons to ourselves but will share them with you here each month, starting with a post next month on nurturing and motivating community contributors.

In the meantime, if you have ideas about what we should try to implement on The Local, please let us know in the comment section.

1) Formatting Can Be Frustrating. If you’re design-minded – or just eager to keep your Word documents looking a particular way – Docs’ formatting glitches can occasionally be annoying. Docs can import Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, but so far, still doesn’t do well enough at preserving complex formatting. The original document’s words, numbers and information are all imported, but sometimes the tabs, spacing and other formatting isn’t fully maintained from the original Word doc. Google Docs has been improving its formatting capabilities, though, (Docx documents can now be imported) and has added new features. You can now add images, tables, and drawings to spruce up your documents. Formatting options are less robust but easier to use than those offered by Microsoft Word. And Google Docs now has a template library which lets you use pre-made document styles created by other users.

2) Passwords Aren’t Perfect. If someone intent on getting into your documents gains access to your Google password, they could view and potentially alter your documents, much as they could view or misuse your e-mail account. The same holds true for your computer, of course, but with online documents, the damage can be done knowing only your user name and password, whereas hacking into your computer – or stealing it – might entail more effort. Google offers tips on picking one carefully. Additionally, for those who have experienced the frustration of a forgotten user name or password, you could find yourself locked out of your documents if you forget those key details.

3) Storage Limits. You can store up to 5,000 documents and up to 1,000 spreadsheets. (Click here for Google’s detailed explanation on file size limits). That’s plenty of space for most of us, and just as GMail storage has kept growing, it’s possible Google will eventually boost the free space it offers for Docs. If you bump up against the limit, you can always open a new account. And as noted above, you can now purchase more space for Docs – $5 a year gets you 20GB, enough for hundreds of videos and many thousands of documents. Individual documents have size caps, though the limits are large enough that they rarely create a problem.

Alternatives to Google Docs?

• If you want to check out other free online Word processing options, start with Zoho Writer.
• If you like minimalism, try DarkCopy.com.
• If you just can’t leave Microsoft Word behind, try Microsoft’s Officelive.com.
• Mac writers can try Ommwriter for a Zen approach to words.

Demotix started early last year.  It quickly gained notice by landing a photo shot by a protester of the disputed presidential election in Iran on the front page of The New York Times. Soon after, the site distributed the only photo of a handcuffed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. during his arrest. The image was featured on CNN, CBS, and in the Washington Post and a dozen other publications, earning more than $4000 for the photographer and agency.

But the occasional big sale is not in itself enough to sustain Demotix as a business (Demotix is not yet profitable). It will be a substantial challenge for the site to establish itself as a money-making, go-to shop for crowd-sources news images, especially when those images have a very limited shelf life or commercial value.  To make things even tougher, the competition is often well-established social networking sites such as Flickr and Twitpic.

The idea behind a citizen-based news photo site is pretty straightforward. In a world filled with people carrying digital cameras and with access to the Internet, citizens on the scene of disasters, bombings or other events can submit photos to Demotix for speedy distribution to top-tier news outlets. Like many traditional photo agencies Demotix offers a 50/50 split (photographer retains the copyright to the images).  But unlike many traditional agencies in an era of cutback and shrinking budgets, the site’s price structure isn’t prohibitively expensive.

Munthe and Demotix aren’t the first to try the idea. Several citizen-based or crowd-sourced photo and video agencies have come and gone. Most recently Scoopt, a citizen-based photo site featuring news and entertainment photography, opened, sold to Getty Images and then was shuttered.  Others such as Cell Journalist and Spy Media limp along.

Demotix will also have to navigate the same tough issues that news organizations covering conflict and disasters have always faced — the safety of its photographers (most of the site’s content is submitted by a core group of contributors) and the voracity of the images and accompanying caption info.  The site posts guidelines for its contributors to help ensure safety and accuracy.

Whether Demotix succeeds or fails, it has driven the discussion about citizen-based photojournalism forward. In an article for the journalism.co.uk Kyle MacRae, the founder of Scoopt, wrote that he is skeptical of the future of destination photo sites and envisions a rights-managed, one-click model through photo-based social networking sites like Flickr. At Idea Lab citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor wrote that he thinks the future might be in automated auctions in which a premium is paid for timeliness and authenticity.

What do you think?

When I asked her if there would be a time when such a title would be an oxymoron, she said simply that that time is now.

Schiavocampo has the job many of my students, all aspiring foreign correspondents, want most. With her wheel-on backpack, she goes off to assignments in places like Haiti, Lebanon and Ghana. She blogs, takes still photos, files broadcast pieces for the nightly news and for MSNBC.com, often as her own one-woman video and audio crew.

NBC, like most of so-called mainstream media, has sharply reduced or outright eliminated its foreign newsgathering operations in the past five years. Always the most expensive and perceived by many even inside the industry as the most expendable form of reporting, foreign news gathering has taken a body blow in the dramatically changing economic environment and the digital refiguring of journalism.

But in the supposed ashes of the crash burning of foreign reporting, Schiavocampo and others see a bright future.

“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “We’re finding new ways to tell stories. Things are changing in a way that makes foreign reporting better and more exciting.”

In my shortened career as an editor at Newsday, a paper like several others that closed all of its foreign bureaus, I saw the quick emergence of the advantages of technology in gathering and dispersing foreign news. Satellite phones themselves were remarkably useful as replacements for the scratchy, impossibly unpredictable service from some countries. Transmission of stories in the first Gulf War was possible at times only through cable. Earlier, photographers and broadcast journalists who covered big events like the Iran hostage crisis at times would have to put their film on a plane to get it out to their news organizations.

Schiavocampo, who started out on a traditional path, pursuing a job as a news producer, wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So she left to pitch stories as a print reporter. She added the other skills to meet market demand as a freelancer. NBC noticed and hired her. In that wheel-on backpack, she fits her cameras, two laptops, lights, cables, a tripod and a boom microphone. It all goes in the overhead bin.

Like me, Charles M. Sennott had been a newspaperman his entire career until the Boston Globe closed all its foreign bureaus three years ago. Sennott, with Philip S. Balboni, started Global Post early last year.

“My thinking,” he said as he drove (hands-free) to work in Boston one morning last month, “was 100 percent in the direction of the digital age.”

Global Post is an unquestioned journalistic success with more than 70 correspondents under contract in almost 50 countries, and an ever increasing number of daily hits from not only this country but around the world. Many of the reporters are foreign correspondents who lost their jobs in the abrupt downsizing. But some are talented younger correspondents who never worked for a newspaper or broadcast foreign bureau. Sennott, the executive editor, runs the multi-media website almost as a traditional foreign desk, with assigning editors and copy editors on staff.

“We’re able to put together multi-media packages that are like the best of what was being done when newspapers had foreign bureaus,” he said. “And we’re doing this for the American news consumer. Sure, lots of material is available online from the BBC and other sources. But Americans need foreign reporting that’s geared toward their interests and experiences.”

Sennott is a boisterous personality, passionate about keeping foreign reporting alive. He sees the digital tools available to foreign reporters as a means, not an end, to the pursuit that he has dedicated his professional life to with many years as a correspondent in the Middle East. He continues to report himself, and was particularly proud of this audio slide show he did with photographer Seamus Murphy that accompanied an article from Afghanistan, headlined “Life Death and the Taliban.”

But while the prospects for great journalism are evident in the digital age, the same dogged questions of economic sustainability are on Sennott’s mind a lot these days, as with all of us who love foreign reporting. Global Post seeks advertising and offers a premium subscription service. It pays its correspondents a flat salary that is not comparable to a newspaper and certainly not a broadcast salary for foreign correspondents. It also offers stock incentives.

“I’m really sad that the luxury is gone from having one news organization that took care of you and provided a steady salary, security and benefits for you and your family. It was a wonderful time but that’s over. We have to move on and that’s what we’re doing here. No one knows if Global Post or any other new venture will make it. But foreign news is so important that we have to try.”

The journalist, professor and journalism historian John Maxwell Hamilton, sees Global Post and other ventures not as the dying gasps of foreign reporting, but as a natural progression of an ever-changing environment for foreign news. His important new book, “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting,” traces the incremental evolution through the colonial period when publishers would go to ships to get reports from passengers through various technological, economic and political developments to today.

Prof. Hamilton’s conclusion is that we are in a new stage that he has called the confederacy of foreign correspondents. In this new world, that traditional path of correspondents working for a news organization as described by Sennott is only one of a rich mixture of types of reporters covering foreign news—from reporters at the New York Times to citizen journalists, who used new technologies like cell phone photography and blogging to figure so prominently in the coverage of news events like the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the protests over the Iranian election and the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis.

In the book, Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent himself and professor at Louisiana State University, describes the eight members of this confederacy, including local foreign correspondents, who write about foreign news from here; foreign foreign correspondents, non-Americans who are often citizens of the country they cover; parachute foreign correspondents, such as Mara Schiavocampo; and premium foreign correspondents, who work for high-cost news services, such as Bloomberg or Dow Jones.

When I caught up with him in his office, Hamilton was as optimistic as Schiavocampo and Sennott.

“First of all, it’s not as if there is going to be one solution to the problem,” he said. “I don’t see this as a collapse of bureaus leading to less coverage. Some organizations have pulled back on bureaus, but some have remained strong. The bureau concept has changed. The ability to travel efficiently with reduced equipment and with less people saves time and costs.”

Hamilton argues that foreign reporters have always been in short supply and that foreign news has always had the lowest audience of readers.

“It has always evolved slowly and been the most susceptible to changes in technology and economic conditions. But now we have a much greater variety of information available and a wider variety of the types of reporting and reporters available. We are now seeing an adjustment to the changes. In foreign reporting in particular, and journalism in general, it has been a constant adjustment to change. And it survives through the efforts of the journalists.”

11 Multimedia Sites for Journalists

I hope these 33 sites (collected on a Delicious.com bookmarks page) prove useful for those transitioning to digital journalism as well as those keeping ahead of the curve. It’s not enough for today’s journalists to understand AP style, principles of fairness, and other such basics. We now have to master the new tools of the trade if we want to keep up with our craft. We benefit from mastering Web tools that help us A) gather information and stories, B) make sense of what we find, and C) share the information and stories we produce with our audiences in creative ways. That’s what these 33 sites are about. I’d love your feedback about sites on this list, or those that should have been included instead. Add comments below, or e-mail me directly at the following URL:

http://scr.im/caplan

[P.S. I guess that's site #34: Scr.im is a cool tool that lets you post your e-mail address without attracting spam robots.]

23. Flavors.me
Create a personalized Web page drawing from your blogs, feeds, etc
ALSO TRY: card.ly, gizapage.com

24. Carbonmade
Publish a portfolio of images or flash files to share your work
ALSO TRY: issuu.com, krop.com

25. Vimeo
High-quality, well-designed video publishing service with useful groups and projects to inspire new ideas
ALSO TRY: tubemogul.com, blip.tv

26. Animoto
Create instant, impressive video/slideshows out of your photos and video clips
ALSO TRY: vuvox.com

27. Google Voice
Streamline your multiple phone numbers; add features to your phone
ALSO TRY: skype.com, recordmycalls.com, tokbox.com

28. Prezi
Publish and present ideas with this post-Powerpoint, innovative interface
ALSO TRY: slidesix.com, 280slides.com

29. uStream
Shoot and broadcast live video from a mobile device
ALSO TRY: qik.com, twitvid.com

30. Weebly
Create a simple site quickly and easily
ALSO TRY: wix.com, jimdo.com, wordpress.org, Squarespace.com

31. Doodle.com
Schedule meetings and group projects
ALSO TRY: meetomatic.com, timetomeet.info

32. Bubbl.us
Mind mapping for idea generation
ALSO TRY: mindmeister.com, cacoo.com

33. Picnik
Online photo-editing tool; great features, sleek, easy-to-use interface
ALSO TRY: photoshop.com, picasaweb.google.com

The key is understanding the available tools. My previous post listed the first 11 sites in a three-part workshop (held recently as part of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s January Academy) about essential sites for journalists. All 33 sites are bookmarked on this Delicious.com bookmarks page.

The first group of sites focused on finding, managing and organizing info. This second group of sites, below, is all about blogging, publishing, storing and sharing information. Below each site’s description, I’ve noted a couple of related sites you might also find useful.

12. Posterous
A brilliantly simple tool for blogging by e-mail. Some journalists use it to streamline their work by sending a single e-mail and having Posterous post the material (text, pictures, video, audio, whatever) simultaneously to a blog and to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Posterous also enables group blogging and crowdsourcing – some publications have used it to publish moderated e-mail (text and photo) contributions from readers.
ALSO TRY: soup.io, ping.fm

13. Tumblr
An elegant microblogging tool. Accessible to anyone who has never blogged or published before. Numerous available themes so you can present yourself in a professional way without knowing anything about HTML. Easy to use and well-designed.
ALSO TRY: blogger.com, wordpress.com

14. Google Docs
For many wired journalists, Google Docs has replaced Microsoft Word, because it enables you to easily access and edit your documents from anywhere. You can type and then instantly publish your documents as Web pages if you want to, for live coverage. You can also use Docs to organize data and info about sources into neat lists and spreadsheets. Read this post for more about how Docs can be useful for journalists.
ALSO TRY: docs.zoho.com, officelive.com, ommwriter.com, darkcopy.com

15. Google Forms
Create instant surveys and polls. Automate information collection. Create a simple link that you then e-mail to people or post to a Web page or to Twitter or Facebook to invite and tabulate responses automatically. To show you how this works (and how it can be used) here’s a sample 3-question survey you can take that was created in two minutes using Google Forms. [URL: docs.google.com/forms]
ALSO TRY: polldaddy.com, polleverywhere.com, doodle.com

16. ZeeMaps
Build maps to supplement stories or to add geographic info to blog posts. Supplements Google Maps.
ALSO TRY: umapper.com, communitywalk.com

17. drop.io
Create a collaborative workpace to share and publish materials. Read this post for more detail.
ALSO TRY: dropbox.com, skydrive.com, glidedigital.com

18. Google Moderator
Collect ideas and questions. Enable voting and moderation. [URL: google.com/moderator]
ALSO TRY: allourideas.org, Wridea.com, kindlingapp.com

19. SeeClickFix
Track local issues and community complaints. Embed local reports.
ALSO TRY: outside.in, fwix.com

20. bit.ly
Shorten URLs and monitor responses and references to your stories.
ALSO TRY: fur.ly, cl1p.net, snipurl.com

21. Ning
Create and participate in niche social networks about subjects or communities of interest. One group worth joining if you’re interested in keeping up with digital journalism is called Wired Journalists.
ALSO TRY: grou.ps, groups.google.com

22. FriendFeed
Monitor people and subjects you’re interested in, keep track of RSS feeds (blog posts, photos, videos, news, etc), and publish updates to your network. (Recently bought by Facebook).
ALSO TRY: digg.com, linkedin.com, analytics.google.com

Here’s a printable PDF of the handout for this workshop:

11 MORE Sites for Journalists

The first 11 sites, below, are primarily for reading, gathering, organizing and managing information. For each site listed, I also suggest below a few related sites that I’ve found useful.

I put together the list as part of a workshop for the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s January Academy. I created a Delicious.com bookmarks page for the sites; for those who prefer old-fashioned paper, here is a free print-ready PDF I used as a handout, listing these first 11 sites. More to follow separately.

1. Google Reader
An inbox for RSS feeds, blog posts, pictures, videos and other materials
Also Try: feedly.com, bloglines.com, igoogle.com

2. Delicious
Save, organize and share links and discover new sites. Search by subject tags to find relevant pages
Also Try: Diigo.com, Publish2.com, Facette for Delicious

3. Evernote
Organize notes and Web research
Also Try: Google Docs, Zoho Notebook, Backpackit.com, MIT’s List.it

4. Instapaper
Save stories to read later
Also Try: Laterloop.com, readitlaterlist.com

5. Readability
Make articles and sites more legible
Also Try: Tidyread.com, printfriendly.com, readable-app.appspot.com

6. Alltop
Create a custom page for subjects you want to research or keep tabs on
Also Try: popurls.com, OriginalSignal.com, EuFeeds.eu, digg.com, stumbleupon.com

7. NY Times Prototypes
Innovative formats: How tomorrow’s journalism may look
Also Try: labs.digg.com, fastflip.googlelabs.com, SI tablet video – and one from Bonnier

8. The Internet Archive
Find open-source material and look back at historical Web pages
Also Try: creativecommons.org, flickr.com/commons, Life Magazine’s photo archive

9. Spezify
Track Your tracks. Monitor social media references to your work or topics you cover
Also Try: socialmention.com, google.com/alerts, viewzi.com, pipl.com

10. Scribd
Find and share documents and presentations on subjects of interest
Also Try: Slideshare.com, Docstoc.com, issuu.com

11. Muck Rack
Journalists on Twitter. Find colleagues and collaborators to track on Twitter. Monitor subjects.
Also Try: monitter.com, tweetdeck.com, wefollow.com

33 Sites Every Journalist Should Know - Part I

Please share your comments about these 11 sites or the alternatives listed.

Part 2: Sites 12-22 – Posterous.com, Tumblr.com etc.

Part 3: Sites 23-33 – Vimeo, Google Voice, Picnik etc.