Chris Snider

I noticed Twitter’s new Blackbird Pie feature today for the first time.

Have you ever come across a great tweet and wanted to share it with your blog readers? I have. And until today I had to take a screengrab of said tweet to post to my blog.

Not anymore. Twitters Blackbird Pie allows me to embed someone’s tweet, with all of the links intact.

I see a few good uses for media companies related to this:

• In sports coverage, if you want to show what athletes on your beat are tweeting about.
• If you cover a concert or event, and you want to show what others who attended were saying.
• In breaking news situations, you can show what others (especially eye witnesses) are sharing about the news.

Here’s what the embedded tweets look like:

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The Sunday paper is still a money-maker. With all those circulars and real estate ads, it’s clear why newspapers are putting most of their promotional efforts into increasing circulation of the Sunday product.

More and more, papers are now using their web sites to promote the Sunday print product. Some (see the Indianapolis Star image above) are going so far as to withhold stories from the online edition of the paper in an effort to get people to go buy a copy of the Sunday paper.

I’m not a fan of withholding information from digital readers for a few reasons: (1) Not all of our readers live in an area where they can go buy a copy of the paper. (2) You lose the ability for your content to go viral. (3) You give someone else the opportunity to own discussion around that topic online. (4) You lose out on online ad revenue by having less content online.

But I do think there is merit in better digital promotion of the Sunday paper. So I’ve created a worksheet/checklist to help you better promote your Sunday products to your digital readers. The worksheet is intended to help you promote your best Sunday work during the week (Friday) and again on Sunday. I hope you find it to have value.

You may also like:

• Online breaking news checklist.
• Covering breaking weather news online.

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I sat in on a Poynter webinar on multimedia tools for journalists – from point-and-shoot cameras to $21,000 3-D video cameras.

While I don’t see the Des Moines Register springing for the 3-D camera anytime soon, I did find some equipment that would suit us just fine. Here’s a list of the items that caught my eye:

I’m honored to once again be teaching journalists about new media tools on Feb. 13 at Drake University.

I’m even more excited about who will be joining me for the workshop. Nathan Wright will be teaching and answering your questions about how journalists can use social media. And Pete Jones will talk about how he built a strong following for his blog, desmoinesisnotboring.com.

If you attend, I promise you’ll learn these things:

• How to create your own blog.
• How twitter, facebook and linkedin can make you a better journalist (or to find a job).
• 20+ tools to make you a more efficient journalist.
• Hands-on with using RSS feeds.
• Hands-on with live chats using CoverItLive.
• How to find and edit photos for your blog.
• How to broadcast live video from your computer.

Cost is $100. To register: Contact Shari Tenney in the Drake School of Journalism and Mass communication, shari.tenney@drake.edu or 271-3194.

For more information: Contact Patricia Prijatel, E.T. Meredith Distinguished Professor Emeritus, patricia.prijatel@drake.edu

More info about the workshop here.

1. This tweet from @TracyGardner pretty much sums up what I’ve been trying to teach my Online Entrepreneurial Journalism class this semester as they try to find their niche in the digital media world.

2. Chris Brogan shares his advice for businesses getting started on social media. Read more about what he’s saying here.

Chris Brogan Shares Social Media Tips from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

3. If your blog needs a redesign (I’m starting to think that mine does), here are some great WordPress themes via Smashing Magazine.

4. Like new tools but hate spending money? Check out these free alternatives to some common multimedia tools.

It’s difficult to remember every possible tool you can use when news breaks, which is why we have a breaking new checklist to follow at DesMoinesRegister.com.

We don’t do everything on the list in every situation, but it’s a good reminder of the many tools that are available, both to promote the news and to enhance the reader experience around the news.

Here’s a list to help you start your own breaking news checklist Download as PDF.:

Promote the news

• Post to Twitter (and have staffers post to their Twitter accounts)
• Post to Facebook
• Send breaking news text alert
• Send breaking news e-mail alert
• Send a message to MySpace friends
• Create a widget so others can add news to their site
• Buy keywords on Google/Yahoo/Facebook
• Send to Drudge, Reddit, Digg, Fark
• Send info to bloggers/sites who cover that topic
• Post info in forums related to that topic
• Put together a print promotion plan

Tools to use on your site

• Use an alternative home page design
• Create a poll
• Start a breaking news blog
• Should any of your staff bloggers promote on their blog?
• Are there community members who can blog about this topic?
• Link to blogs outside your site
• Start a discussion forum
• Ask readers to submit photos
• Create a live chat
• Create a hastag for Twitter/Flickr/etc.
• Ask readers for YouTube videos
• Ask readers what questions they have/what info they know
• Add a Google locator map
• Create a Google map that allows readers to add content
• Create a searchable database
• Q&A with reporter or editor or source
• Ask Twitter followers for feedback or help
• Add links to more coverage elsewhere on the web
• Create a site that captures social media conversation on the topic
• Aggregate content from other sites onto our site
• Create an RSS feed for continuing content
• Allow readers to subscribe to that RSS via e-mail
• Post large photos online (in a blog or story)
• Offer print pages for sale
• Highlight the best comments from readers

Don’t forget

• Take screengrabs
• Alert advertising department so they can sell ads around the news/content

Download this list as a PDF document.

What other tools should be on this list? Please share them in the comments area.

Photo credit: hyperscholar on Flickr

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Have you been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for someone to grab your hand and pull you into the new digital world of journalism? Well, wait no more. Here are 15 ways you can jump in right now.

1. Read Chris Brogan’s blog.

2. Read this one post by Rob Curley.

3. Read Mashable. You don’t have to read every post, but skim the headlines and see if anything catches your eye.

4. Stop talking about why you’re not going to join Twitter. And join Twitter.

5. Go to WordPress or Blogger and start a blog. About anything – your family, your love of puppies, how much you hate blogs (just make sure you are passionate about the topic).

6. Start using an RSS reader. Here are feeds from Chris Brogan, Rob Curley and Mashable to get you started.

7. Start clicking around the SND toolkit page. Any of those seem useful?

8. Buy a URL (try GoDaddy or FatCow). Use the free sitebuilding tools to get your site up and running. Or better yet, use a program such as Dreamweaver or iWeb to create your site.

9. Start doing these tutorials.

10. Shoot a movie with your digital camera, edit it in whatever free movie editing program came with your computer (iMovie or Movie Maker, perhaps), and post to YouTube.

11. Go through this HTML tutorial.

12. Start following these new media blogs:

• Old Media New Tricks
• BeatBlogging
• Poynter E-media tidbits
• Journalistopia
• OJR

13. Set up a Google alert so that you are e-mailed anytime someone posts your name (or your companys name) online.

14. Create a Google map of everywhere you ever lived (click on “My Maps” and “Create new map.”)

15. Create a delicious account and start saving interesting stories you find online. Start following other feeds as well. (Here’s mine.)

Photo by the_tahoe_guy on Flickr.

I tuned into my first journchat last Monday night in-between helping my Drake students with their final web projects – and I was impressed for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I love the concept: “The mission of #journchat is to keep an ongoing, open dialogue between journalists, bloggers and public relations professionals.”

If anything, it might even be a little too broad. I’d love to have a similar chat for journalists to talk about how we can use social media tools in our everyday jobs.

I also enjoyed the format of hosting a chat on Twitter. I never really considered Twitter a great live chat tool until I saw what you can do using Twitter and Tweetgrid (just type in #journchat on Tweetgrid to see what I mean). You can follow multiple conversations and monitor multiple keywords at a time.

See what #journchat is all about 7-10 p.m (central time) tonight.

Follow @journchat or @PRsarahevans on Twitter for more information.

We can’t add more hours to the day, but we can work more efficiently. Here are some tools that could help reporters be more productive.

1. Google Reader
Don’t waste your time going to dozens (or hundreds) of web sites every day. Use the RSS feeds from those sites and just check one web site for all the latest information.

2. Google alerts
Want to know anytime someone posts a video, news story or blog about your beat? Sign up for Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts and you’ll get an email with all the latest info.

3. Jott
Need to send a quick note to yourself from the road? Call Jott. Speak your message. And Jott will email you the text of what you said. (You get unlimited 15-second calls for free).

4. Mezzoman
Need to meet a source somewhere between your location and their location? Mezzoman suggests a halfway point.

5. Wikirage
Shows the pages on Wikipedia that are receiving the most edits over various periods in time – which roughly translates to what’s popular in that given timespan.

6. Google trends
Similar to Wikirage, this shows topics that are suddenly being searched an unusual amount of times on Google.

7. Alerts.com
Do you forget things, like meetings? Or birthdays? Get a text alert to remind you. Or set up a wake-up call. Or just check out all of their alert options.

8. Simplynoise.com
Does it get loud in your newsroom? A little white noise will drain that out.

9. iGoogle or Pageflakes
Create a custom home page and get all the info you need in one place (photos, weather, news, twitter, e-mail, calendar, facebook, music).

10. Technorati
Find out what the blogosphere is talking about – either in general, or in a particular area.

11. People finders
Trying to find out more about a person, but only know their name or e-mail address? Try Pipl, Wink and YoName.

12. Qipit
E-mail a photo to copy@qipit.com (even from your phone) and it sends back a PDF. Great for sharing notes written on a white board.

13. ask500people
Got a question that you need others’ opinions on? Ask 500 people.

14. Google docs
Do you work on multiple computers? Create and write all of your documents and spreadsheets online – so you can always access them from any computer.

15. Tweet Grid
Want to know what people on Twitter are saying about any given topic at any given time? Tweet Grid lets you follow multiple Twitter searches at once.

Who says you need a staff of developers and tons of time to make a great web site? These tools are easy to use and easy to add to your site.

1. Coveritlive.com
CoverItLive allows you to blog live from an event (you can even do it from your iPhone). It’s also a great tool for hosting live chats on your site.

2. Blip.tv
There are a lot of tools that can embed video on your site (YouTube.com Vimeo.com, qik.com), but I’m starting to be a big fan of blip.tv. It create a nice-looking index of your videos and make it easy to offer your videos as an iTunes podcast.

3. Mogulus.com
With just a video camera and an internet connection, Mogulus lets you broadcast live video. Also try justin.tv and ustream.tv.

4. Animoto.com
Don’t just post photo galleries. Turn your best photos into a music video.

5. Vuvox.com
Create slideshows, timelines and more that include photos, music and videos. See an example here (below the scroll).

6. Soundslides.com
Easy-to-use tool for adding slideshows with audio to your site.

7. Slideshowpro.net
Another great tool for creating slideshows and embedding on your site. Indystar.com uses this to let reader embed slideshows on their sites.

8. Google maps
We all understand the value of maps and map mash-ups. That doesn’t mean we all have the skills to create them. Fortunately there are some tools that help. Such as umapper.com, mapalist.com, mapbuilder.net, quikmaps.com and fmatlas.com.

9. Polldaddy.com
Creates polls that you embed on your site. I also just discovered Polls Boutique.

10. Response-o-matic
Creates a quick online contact form, or use it to make surveys and multiple-question polls. Also check out surveymonkey.com.

11. Mypodcast.com and gabcast.com
Think podcasting is hard? Think again. Mypodcast records your podcast directly to the web. Gabcast turns a phone call into a podcast.

12. Flickr.com groups
Your readers are already posting photos to Flickr. Why not start a group and embed those photos on your site?

13. YouTube reader videos
Your readers are already uploading videos to YouTube. Create a custom player to put those videos on your site.

14. Slideshare.net
You’re a wiz with Powerpoint and/or Keynote. Don’t you wish you could add those presentations to your site? You can.

15. Wordle.net
Text can be boring. Turn speeches into word clouds.

16. Issuu.com
Want to replicate the “print experience” online? Issuu helps your put your publications actual pages online so readers can flip through them.

17. DocStoc.com
Don’t make your readers download documents and PDFs. Let them read them directly from your site with embed codes from docstoc.

18. 4info.net
Send text alerts to your readers’ phones – and make money for doing it.

19. Feedburner.com
Sure, you’ve got RSS feeds. But can you track how often they are used? Or allow readers to subscribe via e-mail? Or put ads on your feeds? Feedburner can.

20. Widgetbox.com
Create a widget from your RSS feeds and encourage others to add your content to their sites.

21. Sproutbuilder.com
Creates even cooler widgets than widgetbox. Cool enough that you will want to put them on your site, too.

22. Sharethis.com
Make it easy for readers to share your content across social media platforms (see example at the bottom of this post).

23. Mofuse.com
Create a mobile version and an iPhone version of your web site in minutes using RSS feeds. See previous post on mofuse here. Also check out wirenode.com and mippin.com.

24. Odiogo.com
Reading is hard. Listening is easy. Odiogo turns your text into audio.