Tools for News

A pretty good beta database for all kinds of journalism tools to use. Register and you can add to the growing list. 

One last hurrah for newspaper competition

An awesome story about how an intern at the Chicago Tribune won a Chicago Sun-Times contest.

Too bad in the decline of competing newspapers we don't get to see great ideas like this anymore. Radio doesn't even do this much anymore considering they are all owned by the same company these days. Too bad, might be one way to increase readership. You know, actually competing on stories that the community wants to know about rather than sharing the same freaking content.  

Seattle P-I Year in Photos

I always love the P-I's YiP. The staffers pick their favorite 10 images and explain the back story to the photos. It's always fun to learn a little more about why or how a photo was made.

Photojournalists get the job done

A NYTimes story about the Mumbai attacks detailing how two working photojournalists had the images and reportage that mattered. Though there were many "citizen journalists" posting photos on Flickr, Twitter and other social networks as the attacks unfolded Sebastian D’souza and Vasant Prabhu have hundreds of images documenting the events and ability to describe some details they witnessed.

Granted these two put themselves in dire situations to make the resulting images, the point is that a citizen journalist is not going to willingly put themselves in danger for the sake of journalism. We could then get into the credibility debate as well, but that would take hours. A working professional has a base of experience and knowledge to work from in tough situations that most citizen journos won't. When you need something done right, best to use a professional.

10 Questions for Journalists in the Information Age and info-overload

Here's some great notions to consider in this overwhelming era of easily accessible information. Having the right information available in functional and engaging access points will be a major component of successful journalism. Too bad most newspapers just shovel all their content into a big bucket on the web and expect readers to "find" what they need to know. Newspapers were barely able to accept the notion that television was a competitor by the time the Internet began to steal even more of their audience. Glacial pace won't work in the instantaneous realm of the Information Age.

Boston's BIG Picture year in photos

This is only the first of three gallery pages. Gotta love those GIANT photos. Looking back at 2008, you will find several newspapers that "borrowed" the Big Picture idea and turned their daily galleries into similar productions.

MSNBC's Year in Photos for 2008

Good blend of audio and visuals from the year. MSNBC always puts together good multimedia. Just wish they would go easy on the music sometimes. But when you go back and see what photos are the most popular, you will understand what the major audience type is. Still good stuff to look at.

2008 Year in Pictures by NY Times

Nicely done gallery with full-screen mode. Lots of photos that you really don't get to see when you just read the stories on the web.