Category Archives: Tips

Links, Mobile, Multimedia, Social Media, Teaching, Tips, Tools

Journalist’s Toolbox Updated for #spj10

This post was originally published on the Journalist’s Toolbox, a resource offered by the Society of Professional Journalists. It was republished here with permission.

SPJ National Convention

Some great links from Jeff Cutler’s online tools session and others on Monday: Buzz.Yahoo.com for mining story ideas; Search.Twitter.com Advanced for detailed Twitter and hashtag searches and WalletPop, a finance site that helps you find the most dangerous neighborhoods for crime. More to come later in the convention!

Add SPJ National Convention

The Journalist’s Toolbox will post tweets live Oct. 3-5 from the convention in Las Vegas. Just follow @journtoolbox and the #spj10 hashtag.

Copy Editing Resources

It’s not the fanciest site on the Web, but DrGrammar.org has a great quick-reference page. Another helpful tool: Thsrs, the shorter thesaurus, which produces shorter synonyms for any word you type in. It’s a very helpful tool for writing short, tight headlines.

Twitter Resources

We’ve added dozens of new resources, including Twitter guides for journalists, backgrounds, URL shorteners and other tools on the Toolbox’s Twitter Resources page.

Mobile Journalism Resources

The Toolbox has launched a Mobile Journalism page that features links to app-making tools, readings on mobile media strategy and a list of recommended apps for journalists to use on their smart phones.

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Tips, Tools

Advanced Delicious Search Operators

You can search bookmarks on Delicious using advanced parameters. By default, searches look at text in the description, notes or tags fields. Search operators allow you to narrow the search for specific results.

Let’s say I want to find a recipe that uses lettuce and tomato as ingredients, but I don’t want BLT references:

How does this work?

  • tag:recipe – only show items with the tag “recipe”
  • “lettuce and tomato” – limit to this phrase with all words in this order
  • lettuce:tomato – show results that include the word “lettuce” and “tomato” side by side in that order, but may be separated by punctuation.
  • (X OR Y) – include any bookmarks matching either X or Y
  • -bacon -BLT – exclude results that include “bacon” or “BLT”

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Teaching, Tips

Hacking the Web: View Source, Read HTML, Trace Paths, Download Files

A group of students in a visual journalism course at the University of Miami interviewed industry leaders about the concept of multimedia journalism. They spoke with journalism professors and working professionals from the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC and other outlets. The resulting website, Multimedia Standards, provides expert opinion on the definition of “multimedia,” what it takes to make successful interactive narratives, and what they think the future holds.

The idea behind the site you’re currently reading, Modern Journalist, is to give my class (WRI 430) a place to experiment, to share what we’re learning as a way of practicing online publishing. A site like Multimedia Standards helps not only the class that creates it, but both the teachers and students who follow.

Audio Podcast Exercise

After challenging students to define multimedia journalism, I detailed their first hands-on exercise: create an audio podcast using clips from the Multimedia Standards grid.

Multimedia Standards grid

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