Unsplash | High-Resolution Photos. Tech & Tools. 20 tools and resources every journalist should experiment with. Tools have always come from the need to carry out a specific task more effectively. It's one of the main differences between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. We may still be slaves to the same old evolutionary urges but we sure know how to eat noodles in style.
In journalism, an abstract tool for uncovering the most interesting and insightful information about society, we can generally boil the workflow down to four stages: finding, reporting, producing and distributing stories. So with that in mind, here are a range of tools which will – hopefully – help you carry out your journalism tasks more effectively. 1. A somewhat simplistic start to the list, maybe, but Google has many tricks that every self-respecting journalist should be taking advantage of.
While it is very good for a spot of online shopping and business, journalists need to learn a few tweaks and tips to improve their online searching with the use of search operators. The site search function (e.g. 2. 3. 4. 5. Smallpdf.com - A Free Solution to all your PDF Problems. New open source tool to help reporters rethink quotes in stories. Credit: Image from Thinkstock Quotes are often the most interesting part of a story. They can help the audience relate or identify more with the topic and strengthen the reporting, but quoting a source in text often doesn't do justice to the impact their words could have in audio or video form.
This is why The Times is testing quickQuote, a tool that uses videos and automatic transcription to make quotes easier to find and use in articles. "The initial problem was finding a way to make it easier and more interesting to work with video in the newsroom," said Pietro Passarelli, former newsroom developer intern at The Times, who developed quickQuote. Earlier this year, The Times also experimented with audio quotes, using the format in its multimedia coverage of the 7/7 bombings anniversary. QuickQuote, which was open-sourced last week, requires users to upload their video footage and then provides an automated transcription using natural language processing. Screenshot from quickQuote. Delicious. Creating Animated Bubble Charts in D3 - Jim Vallandingham. Update: I moved the code to its own github repo - to make it easier to consume and maintain.
Update #2 I’ve rewritten this tutorial in straight JavaScript. So if you aren’t that in to CoffeeScript, check the new one out! Recently, the New York Times featured a bubble chart of the proposed budget for 2013 by Shan Carter . It features some nice, organic, animations, and smooth transitions that add a lot of visual appeal to the graphic. This was all done using D3.js . As FlowingData commenters point out , the use of bubbles may or may not be the best way to display this dataset. In this post, we attempt to tease out some of the details of how this graphic works. #Simple Animated Bubble Chart In order to better understand the budget visualization, I’ve created a similar bubble chart that displays information about what education-based donations the Gates Foundation has made.
You can see the full visualization here And the visualization code is on github #D3’s Force Layout #nodes #gravity #friction. Analyzing the Top 30 Infographics on Visually. Ever wonder what makes an infographic successful? Why do some infographics accumulate more than 1 million views and others, barely 100? We’ve talked about viral infographics before, from a creative process standpoint: the story, data and design of an infographic all play a role in whether it will appeal to the masses, as does the way it is promoted. But what does viral content have in common? There are more than 16,000 graphics and visualizations on Visual.ly, so comprehensive analysis would take some time. A good place to start is at the very top. Looking at the top 30 pieces of content on the site should yield some clues that will guide more analysis in the future.
The primary statistic used is unique pageviews accumulated since the Visual.ly website launched in July 2011. The graphics can be grouped into buckets based on four dimensions: 1. Four Content Types (The SVG charts embedded below link to the individual graphics, but may not appear in some browsers). 1. 2. 3. 4. Six Design Types. Evernote. Lembre-se de tudo com o Evernote, o Skitch e outros apps incríveis. Codecademy - Aprenda a programar.