Posts tagged reporter

Top 8 Journalism Apps of 2010 (That You’ll Use All Next Year)

December 7th, 2010

This year news apps were either horrible villains or lifesaving heroes depending on your perspective. But what about apps for journalists — for reporters who need information and tools on the go? I’m not talking about podcasting or video editing apps. I’m talking about mobile and cloud-based tools that the average journalist will use on a regular or even day-to-day basis. Here are my top eight choices that either launched or received significant upgrades in 2010.

1: Rapportive

Mac, PC, Firefox, Safari, Mailplane, Fluid and Chrome; free

This is my favorite tool of 2010. As my co-worker Marshall wrote last March: “Stop what you are doing and install this plugin.” He wasn’t kidding. Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail account with publicly available information about the person who sent you the email: links to their social networking accounts, their photo and biographical info, even a live feed of their tweets. Not only that, if you mouse over other email addresses included in the email, those people’s info shows up, too. At right is what the right half of an email from my boss looks like.

Suddenly, the sources you exchange email with have a face, and even better, their background info is at your fingertips.

It’s not omniscient. Rapportive displays data based on the specific email address that the sender is using. If they use a different email to log in to social networks, then those accounts won’t show up. One fun bonus is that it finds some hilariously old accounts. You’ll be surprised how many people have long-forgotten Friendster profiles.

2: Simplenote

Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Web; free/paid (no ads)

This is my second most-used tool of 2010. By itself, Simplenote, is, well, pretty simple. It’s a note-taking app that syncs what you write — whether you’re using a mobile device or a computer — live to the Web. It’s been around for two years but got a very significant update (tags, versioning, word count, sharing) in August. Its real power lies in its ability to work with a host of other desktop and mobile apps and browser extensions. Once you link to one of those tools, you no longer have to pay attention to Simplenote. It stays in the background, instantly syncing what you write to the cloud.

For instance, I use an app called Notational Velocity for pretty much everything I write. I like it because it stores what I write within the app; I don’t have any folders full of old documents. When I started using Notational Velocity I linked it to Simplenote and then forgot about Simplenote completely. But no matter where I go, no matter what computer or smartphone I use, I have access to everything I am working on or have written in the past.

True, there are plenty of other cloud-connected note-taking apps out there (Notespark, Evernote, etc.), but none have the simplicity and versatility of Simplenote.

3: Photoshop mobile app

iPhone, iPad, Android; free

Like note-taking apps, there are tons of image-editing tools out there. The Photoshop mobile app is a simple powerhouse that outperforms everything else. It meets my criteria for an on-the-go reporting tool: it’s stable, powerful and easy to use.

If you want hip filters and splashy effects, this isn’t for you. But if you need to quickly and easily color correct or make cropping/rotating changes to an image before you send it back to your newsroom or post it on your blog, this is your best bet. Over the course of 2010 it got several updates: new tools, Facebook and Flickr connection, and more.

4: Police and fire radio scanners

iPhone: 5-0 Radio; free/paid (extra feeds). Android: Scanner Radio; free/paid (no adds, more controls)

Even thought I work for a tech news site and don’t need an app like this, I love it. I wish I had something like it back when I was a daily reporter.

Scanner Radio for Android launched this year with more than 2,300 live police and fire scanners and weather radios from around the world. One interesting feature is that it will let you know when a specific feed has a lot of listeners. According to the developer, “You could have the app alert you when any scanner in the directory has more than 500 listeners, or, you could have it alert you when scanners you choose (such as those in your area) have more than, say, 50 listeners.”

I use 5-0 Radio, which launched in 2009. It claims to have “the largest collection of live police, firefighters, aircraft, railroad, marine, emergency, and ham radio” feeds.

5: USA.gov mobile app

iPhone, mobile Web; free

This may seem a little elementary, but the USA.gov app is unmatched as a portal for searching all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal government websites, including in some cases vital birth, marriage and death records. It also does image searches and government recall searches.

Out in the field covering a fire and need some background? Punch your city name and “fire code” into the app. What about reporting about an accident at a job site? Searching for your city name plus “OSHA fatality” will bring up the agency’s website that lists accident reports.

6: Mobile document scanners

iPhone: JotNot Pro; $0.99. ScannerPro ($6.99), Document Scanner ($4.99), Scanner & Fax ($7.99)

These kinds of apps sometimes get mixed reviews (and I’m kind of cheating since some of then came out before 2010). They’re essentially camera apps that are really good at enhancing text in the images they take. Can you do the same thing by taking a photo and messing with the contrast and sharpness? Yes, in some cases. But often you can’t: the paper is wrinkled; the paper isn’t on a flat surface; you have multiple pages that need to be a single document; you need the resulting image to be a PDF.

I use JotNot Pro (right) mainly because it’s cheap. If I forked out $4.99 for something like Document Scanner I would also be able to do things like OCR (a process where images of words are turned into actual text). Each of the apps I listed have varying features that may or may not fit what you need from a tool like this.

7: DocumentCloud

Private beta

DocumentCloud made big headlines when it launched earlier this year. If you don’t remember, it’s “an index of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web.” Since then, dozens of small and large news orgs have used it to annotate and augment public documents that they’ve published. As of August, there were close to 500 users and 100 newsrooms participating in the beta trial.

I don’t know when the service will go public (the development team has been rolling out updates for beta testers throughout the year), but when it does, it’s going to be an invaluable tool for newsrooms, regardless of their size.

8: The Onion mobile app

iPhone, Android; free

The Android app came out this year (the iPhone version launched in 2009), and it is, as The Onion says, the “last bastion of unbiased, reliable, and definitive news in a world dominated by superficiality, mediocrity, and non-Onion news outlets.” You need it.

Did I miss any of your favorites? What will you be using in 2011? Let me know about it in the comments.

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Build a Robot Journalist Assistant in 3 Easy Steps

October 12th, 2010

Overview

Too much information, too little time to sift through it — who has time to find the few relevant stories that dozens or hundreds of beat-related blogs and company and government sites produce every day?

How about a digital assistant? There’s a way to automate that filtering process in just a few steps using Yahoo Pipes. One of the best parts about Pipes is that you don’t need to do any heavy lifting on your own to create powerful tools. You are free to copy publicly available Pipes and alter them however you need.

That’s what we’ll do to a “robot assistant” that I built. I use it to take more than 80 RSS feeds from a wide spectrum of political sites, bloggers, analysts, lobbyists and pollsters who I think are interesting and filter the hundreds-plus posts they generate each day with just a few specific keywords. The result? I end up with 10-15 posts every day that I know are likely to interest me. It’s completely automatic; I never have to think about it.

Here’s how to take that Pipe and make it your own.

…continue reading Build a Robot Journalist Assistant in 3 Easy Steps

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Hey media startups: J school students need your help (and you need theirs)

October 27th, 2009

I spent the better part of last weekend at the University of Oregon’s journalism school. On Saturday I was a panelist at the Building a Better Journalist conference, and on Sunday I took part in the Redefining J School barcamp. I don’t have a journalism degree. In fact, I don’t have a college degree at all. But this weekend I learned this: Professional journalists and their news organizations need to start thinking about how we can help students get the training they need.

webed_fistIt was a weekend of contrasts. I came away amazed by some sessions and depressed by others. The conversation during the barcamp was so fast and sharp at times it was almost impossible to take notes; the new media sessions at the conference had a great range in topics as well.  Of course, there were also a few tedious veterans yabbering about “change.” I get cynical and bored with people who wave the word “digital” around like it’s some kind of healing wand without ever examining what has actually changed in our industry. Journalism students need answers, not aphorisms.

If there was one thing I took away from those two days it was this:

There are j school students out there who want more than what their universities are providing. And we may be loosing some damn good journalists because of it.

That’s not a crack at the U of O. In fact, they’re probably the most proactive university I know of. They recently changed their curriculum so that students get more hands-on training earlier in their studies. Several professors and instructors — including Ed Madison, Michael Werner and Suzi Steffen — were an integral part of the barcamp. Additionally, the university’s journalism department has been a strong supporter of community events like the Digital Journalism Camp and We Make the Media conferences. (Disclaimer: I am involved with organizing both events.)

But the reality is that as easy-to-use blogging, video, audio, programing and other digital tools increases, the number of students entering college with some type of skill is increasing as well. That doesn’t mean that a university can teach all incoming students at a higher level. It means the university has to serve a broader spectrum of students. With, of course, limited resources. Some students, like entrepreneur Daniel Bachhuber for instance, aren’t being challenged enough and they’re dropping out. That’s a tragedy not just for the school, but for the j school students who could be learning from their advanced-level peers.

One solution is to improve existing internship programs. Challenging, real-world work experience isn’t guaranteed to keep students in school, but it’s a significant start. Students at the barcamp had plenty of suggestions: Give us opportunities to add things to our portfolios, training that reflects what’s actually happening in journalism, and work that respects our time. But new journalism startups also need to start creating internship programs. J school interns are not just a source of cheap labor — they’re the talent pool you’re going to be drawing from as you grow.

Out-of-work journalists are fleeing the industry for stable work elsewhere. We can’t afford to loose talented students to other fields as well. Over the next decade we’re going to need them as much as they need us.

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