Beyond Automated Story Aggregation
The Tool: WordPress workaround for creating customizable “topical” news pages Why Use It: Build destination sub-sites for your news outlet that aren’t limited to automatically aggregating similar stories into categories WordPress, once considered mainly a tool for bloggers, has become a standby for quick-to-launch, easy-to-operate news web sites. One of the strengths of WordPress has [...]
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Student Stories: From CUNY to the Wall Street Journal
After sending out countless cover letters, resumes, and emails trying to get a lead on a job, in early March I finally got an offer that will serve as the start of the career I had in mind when I came to graduate school. Defying the odds of a bad economy and what some would [...]
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“Tweeting” Your Research
Twitter has become a popular reporting tool that allows journalists across the world to follow the news in real time. Yet little focus is given to its use as a research tool. With its 140-character limit messages, it is more of a robust research tool than we realize. Here are just few ways that Twitter [...]
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Ranking-Style Surveys Can Solve One-Choice Dilemma
The Tool: Web-based survey builder that lets users “rank” their choices Why Use It: Great way to identify a “least worst” option instead of just a single favorite. I was recently helping some students identify the best day for an event they were planning, and suggested they use some kind of “preferential voting system,” one [...]
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dpBestflow: Digital photo workflow solutions
In the multimedia world work flow might be defined simply as an organized, step-by-step system for getting a job done either by an individual or by a team. Good work flow is characterized by an almost mechanized efficiency throughout a project and consistency of method from one project to the next. With digital photography, especially [...]
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Student Stories: From Box Score Beat to Sports Illustrated
At the beginning of February, I began a job at Sports Illustrated’s website SI.com as part of their new video team. I chalk this up to a small miracle (and a possible mistake in HR), but the people here at Digital News Journalist don’t seem to buy into my aberration theory. They asked me to [...]
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The Sunset Park also rises: Lessons of a newbie blogger
So you want to start a blog? 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 [...]
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Visualizing Story Structure: What Hollywood Can Teach Us
Visualizing data often makes good stories. I wondered how stories themselves could provide data for visualizations. You often hear of the ideal graph of story structure–the classic three-part profile with an introduction to the conflict leading to a climax, and ending with the resolution. This structure would be represented by a slow-rising hill ending with [...]
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CUNY Journalism School takes the lead on The Local
The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism recently assumed the editorial leadership NYTimes.com’s The Local community web site, which covers the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. 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 [...]
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Google Docs for Journalists: Update
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 [...]
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