Journalistools. Recite. Cheap & useful tools that can help entrepreneurial journalists be more efficient. When it comes to tools, entrepreneurial journalists have the advantage of being free. Free of the obligation to use a news organization’s clunky software packages. Free from layers of tech bureaucracy. And free from having to get approval to try new tools. That freedom, of course, comes at a price. Fortunately, software developers have turned the world of tools upside down in recent years.
Here’s a quick guide to some of the most useful, easy-to-use tools for any journalist developing a project without a big budget or a lot of time to invest in learning new tech. Tools for storing & organizing information Once we’ve wrestled down mounting piles of email, most of us start our day with ideas, notes and lots of random stuff to take care of. Here are some examples of how journalism startups can use it: In addition to organizing Web research, reporting notes, source info and other raw material, Evernote helps for recording ideas in audio, picture and text form. Tools for handling invoices.
Journalisme web : 10 tendances tech & 30 outils. Voici le cru 2011 des 10 tendances technologiques utiles au journalistes en ligne, flairées par Amy Webb, et présentées hier à Boston lors de la conférence de l’ONA. Comme toujours, salle comble et show assuré ! Voici le cru 2011 de son top 10 : 1 – Le « search » affiné Les résultats recherchés sur Google, Yahoo ou Bing ne sont plus assez pertinents pour les journalistes ou sont trop personnalisés. De nouveaux outils sont disponibles : Sur les sites ou applications d’infos, le search est trop souvent frustrant. 2- Verticaux et thématiques Les outils d’agrégation ne suffisent plus à réduire la surabondance d’informations. Aujourd’hui des outils de tri et de recommandations par thématiques sont prêts à être installés dans des sites ou des applications pour regrouper plus efficacement et régulièrement nos flux dinfos: 3 – Cercles proches Permettre à un petit groupe d’échanger et d’interagir sur un même sujet.
Les outils les plus récents : 4 – Réseaux sociaux de proximité Pour identifier les gens. Information venue du Web, check! Crédit: DR Comment être sûr qu’un témoignage, publié sur un réseau social, est authentique? Comment s’assurer qu’une image n’est pas un photomontage ou un vieux cliché ressorti des limbes? En glanant, sur le Web , des éléments pour couvrir l’actualité en temps réel, les journalistes doivent repérer les «fakes», ces faux (messages, photos, vidéos, comptes) qui cohabitent, en ligne, avec de vraies infos. Sans précaution ni vérification, c’est la faute de carre. Aussitôt relayée – et moquée – à son tour.
L’enjeu, pour un journaliste, c’est de vérifier que, par exemple, le tweet publié par un étudiant annonçant l’arrestation de Dominique Strauss-Khan, en mai 2011, ou la photo de l’avion sur l’Hudson diffusée sur Twitter par un citoyen américain, en janvier 2009, correspondent à la réalité. «Il n’y a pas de recette miracle, la vérification des contenus trouvés en ligne passe par un travail d’enquête journalistique», m’explique Julien Pain, responsable du site Les Observateurs pour France 24. 8 Google Chrome Extensions for Journalists. When you’re browsing the web for information to help write your story, no browser helps you pull together your work better than Google Chrome. Google Chrome allows you to add extensions to increase the functionality of the browser and help turn it into a real writing and compiling powerhouse. Here are eight Google Chrome extensions which can help journalists get more done with Google’s revolutionary browser.
After the Deadline As a journalist, you know how important it is to ensure that your copy is free from spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors. After the Deadline’s powerful AI system checks your spelling, grammar, and overall writing style to make sure your online copy is error-free. It also checks text in other languages, such as French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate The name for this extension not only sums up its primary functions, but mentions one main thing: it is awesome. Concentrate Chrome Pad Chrome Toolbox Chromodomo Social Translate.
40 Important Lectures for Journalism Students. Flash Journalism updates - Journalists' Toolkit. I have been hard at work updating the Flash Journalism website. New tutorials for ActionScript 3.0 and for working on the Timeline in CS4 and CS5 have been added. The old pages from the original site (created to support the book I wrote about Flash journalism in 2004) are still online, and all the old links will remain operational (for ActionScript 2.0. and Flash MX 2004/Flash 8). I have built a new site on top of the old one. There are lots of new working examples that can be downloaded and used by students or working journalists who are learning to use Flash to tell stories and to add interactivity to stories.
Here are a few to get you started: The main difference I have discovered so far between CS4 and CS5 concerns the way embedded fonts are handled. But if you are using CS5, and you open a CS4 tutorial that includes a dynamic text field, you need to rebuild that text field and embed the fonts in the new way. A fantastic tool for presenting debates – come play. Someone should ask Stef Lewandowski to look after children more often. Any children. Every time he does, he seems to invent something. His latest project – made while cradling his baby son – is Wrangl, a tool for “making sense of both sides of the argument”. This is a problem that has been tackled before – most notably by Debategraph. But Wrangl – at least judging by the example on AV – is better: it looks beautiful, and works wonderfully. That’s partly because it is aimed at for-and-against debates, rather than the broader issues which Debategraph focuses on.
With such a simple basis, it’s then possible to link each argument to a counter-argument – or add new arguments of your own. The design of the site makes it easy to pick out each side’s arguments, and follow those through to counter arguments. It will be interesting to see how the site is used – and abused – and how it develops in response. To test it out, I’ve started a Wrangl of my own – on NHS reforms.
Like this: Like Loading... More free Web tools. It’s quite possible to find something useful and free online every day. Here are a few sites that might come in handy when you’re looking to send off big files, you need audio or images that won’t get you in copyright trouble or you’re looking to build a portfolio site quickly. 1. WeTransfer.com – a free Web-based service for transfering up to 2GB of files to up to 20 people at once. Need to get large files back to multiple people in the newsroom all at once? Here’s an option. 2) Dig.ccmixter.org - if you’re looking for music to use without fear of copyright violaton, check out this site, or for images to include in a graphic or a blog post, look to Compfight.com. 3) Flavors.me - for all those soon-to-be graduates of journalism schools out there.
Thanks to Jeremy Caplan, Director of Education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, for these cool tools. Journalists' Toolkit. Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data. Photo by Dan Nguyen/ProPublica Our Dollars for Docs news application lets readers search pharmaceutical company payments to doctors. We’ve written a series of how-to guides explaining how we collected the data. Most of the techniques are within the ability of the moderately experienced programmer. The most difficult-to-scrape site was actually a previous Adobe Flash incarnation of Eli Lilly’s disclosure site.
These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites -- so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you. The tools With the exception of Adobe Acrobat Pro, all of the tools we discuss in these guides are free and open-source. Ruby – The programming language we use the most at ProPublica. Eight Tools for effective explanation | Explainer.Net.
Explainers often have lofty goals in their subject matter, but we know that different people have different styles of learning. Explainers utilize many tools to break down complicated subjects beyond just a block of text, and we’ve collected eight of the best. Some of them are visual, interactive, or entertaining, but all of them help users easily digest intricate topics. Infographics Infographics are visual representations of data. They can be as simple as a bar graph, or may contain complex interactive elements. In any case, infographics can render information that might seem esoteric in its raw form into something much easier to grasp. Animation Whether you use After Effects, Flash, or good old paper and pencil, animation can be one of the most successful tools for visual explanation. Mapping As Google Maps and its competitors continue to evolve, and location-specific data becomes more readily available, the applications for mapping are growing.
Timelines Music Comics Games/Quizzes. Chartle.net - interactive charts online! 5 Tools for Online Journalism, Exploration and Visualization - ReadWriteCloud. In our last post on data journalism, we ran across a number of tools that would be helpful for anyone who is interested in how to make sense of data. The tools represent a renaissance in how we make sense of our information culture. They provide context and meaning to the often baffling world of big data. This is a snapshot of what is available. We are relying on the work done by Paul Bradshaw, whose blog is an excellent source about the new world of data journalism. Factual Factual provides simple APIs for building Web and mobile apps. How To Create a Table With Factual on Howcast Socrata Socrata is one of a handful of companies and organizations that are shaping the open data movement in government.
Google Fusion Tables Google Fusion Tables is a Google Labs project. Yahoo! Yahoo! OpenHeatMap OpenHeatMap is another example of how to turn data into maps. These are five tools that can be used for online journalism or any online research project. Storify facilite le « journalisme de réseaux sociaux » Avec Storify, une nouvelle forme de journalisme vient peut-être de naître. En tout cas, cette plateforme pousse dans sa logique la plus radicale, ce que l’on pourrait appeler le « journalisme de réseaux sociaux. » Ici, les sources d’information s’appellent Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, les flux RSS et Google.
L’outil offre la possibilité de les trier, sélectionner, organiser, mixer, avec une facilité déconcertante. Il ne reste plus au journaliste qu’à ajouter ses propres informations, éventuellement ses commentaires et ses analyses, et à éditer l’ensemble. Storify est une tout jeune entreprise. Son Pdg, Burt Herman, est aussi le fondateur du mouvement Hacks/Hackers. La genèse du projet tient d’abord à une réflexion et un constat, comme il l’explique à Robert Hernandez de la Online Journalism Review (OJR) : L’idée est venue d’une réflexion sur l’avenir du journalisme et le du fait que désormais chacun crée tellement de contenus. De là est né Storify qui est: Pour aller plus loin. Outils Froids. Common copyright mistakes that can still get you sued :: 10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet.
By Mark S. Luckie The internet makes it incredibly easy to save a photo from a website, copy and paste text, and download and re-upload video and audio…a little too easy perhaps. The desire to instantly share content on the web means some web users are ripping others off, violating copyright laws, and possibly opening themselves up to legal action. The common mistakes below specifically pertain to U.S. laws, as copyright laws vary from country to country. However, the following points also act as moral guidelines to using content online. “This image is on the internet, so it’s cool if I copy and use it.” The number one mistake a lot of web users make is downloading an image from the web and using it on their own sites or blogs (see this example). “If it’s old, I can use it.” Some works like DaVinci’s Mona Lisa and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 were created so long ago, they aren’t subject to modern copyright laws. “If I say I’m not violating copyright laws, it’s cool.”