By Matt Neznanski

Newsroom activists have to do a lot of arm-waving and hand-holding to get reporters to try new ways to tell stories.

Sure, newsroom culture and fear have sunk many a well-intentioned multimedia package and most organizations still make online fight for a place at the assignment desk. But sometimes the big hurdle in getting the raw materials for Web journalism is to get the right tools in the right hands at the right time.

Here’s a story: Recently, I was part of a planning session for a big series we’re planning that will include a lot data analysis, some history, plenty of opportunity for interactivity and feedback, mashups, multimedia; the works. We spun out lots of cool ideas and some plans to make sure our technical staff can build and support the things we talked about.

After the meeting, the reporter came to me and said, “There’s a lot of cool stuff here. What do you need from me?” I had to pause a bit, but realized that I needed everything from him: links to data sources, video, audio, locations for geotags and images.

In order to get the best of everything, to make it spontaneous and sustainable, he’d have to collect things as he went. Which meant he’d have to do a lot of his reporting outside the notebook.

Of course, that means a lot of training around the technology and active support to change the reporter’s natural instinct to grab a notebook or two, two pens and a pencil when heading out the door.

Now he needs those note-taking items plus an audio recorder, a point-and-shoot and a video camera. That’s just a barebones list, according to some accounts of what a mobile journalist needs to pack on assignment.

In small newsrooms like the one I work in, there’s a tendency for the most tech-obsessed to take charge of the gear (since there’s only so much to go around), which lets the rest of the staff avoid the inevitable need to get familiar with the new tools of the trade.

So here’s a call to Web editors, content managers and multimedia shooters: put the camera in the hands of the least technical person in the newsroom. You’ve set the example, now stop enabling your colleagues by doing it for them.

Doing so will probably set off another round of little earthquakes in the newsroom, but we’re used to that by now and it’ll pay off in the long run. And start collecting examples of all the great new stories you’ll be telling to prove to the boss that the pain was worth it.

Matt Neznanski is a city hall and business reporter for the Corvallis Gazette-Times. You can read more about – and from – Matt on his site.

By Jake Batsell

Candidates will be slinging their share of tall tales and fudgy facts at tonight’s GOP primary debate in the Texas governor’s race. And on the real-time Web, it’s more challenging than ever for journalists to sort the truth from the spin.

Tonight, as Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison trade barbs on live TV, their staffers will spin relentlessly on social media sites while also using their own campaign sites to host live blogs and chats to “fact-check” (ahem, spin) the debate. Dark-horse candidate Debra Medina will chime in, too, with up-to-the-minute texts.

Journalists trying to give readers a balanced picture of the debate have their work cut out for them. Especially in real time.

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Just a couple of quick highlights that you don’t want to miss:

News:rewired: If you weren’t in London last week for this one-day conference, fear not, they’ve got you covered. The folks at Journalism.co.uk who organized the event also did a bang-up job covering the event for those who couldn’t be there in person. The main conference coverage page is a comprehensive roundup of links, videos and other information. Educators might consider using this as the basis for a mini lesson plan.

David Cohn on new revenue models: The Spot.Us founder weighs in on the Media Shift Idea Lab blog with a mini manifesto of sorts, titled The Search for a New Revenue Model in Journalism. “One of (the) assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information,” Cohn writes. “That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to “sell” the news.”

By Rick Martin

Starting a website and convincing users to participate can be difficult. People can only visit a handful of websites in their daily browsing, so if your website isn’t one of them why not allow them to contribute from the places that they prefer to go? That could be their own blog, or it might be Twitter, YouTube or Delicious — allowing users to contribute local content from these platforms makes it easier on them as contributors to your platform.

If you’re building a local site with Drupal, you’re bestowed with great power to aggregate this kind of content. But keep in mind that such power also comes with great responsibility (as my late Uncle Ben once told me). It’s always best when users submit this content voluntarily, rather than if you as a site admin just go out and scrape it.

There’s almost no end to the content that you could aggregate (see my previous post on that), so please do so wisely. Aggregating can add value to a site if used properly, but it can also be annoying as all heck if misused. I’m not much in favor of aggregating full blog posts unless the writer of that post has explicitly given permission. Read on if you’d like to hear my brilliant plan of attack for that problem.
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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Jay Huerbin, a journalism major at the University of Pittsburgh and intern at Serra Media. You can read more from Jay on his blog and follow him at @jayhuerbin.

By Jay Huerbin

As both a journalism student and the sports editor at my university’s student newspaper, I take the future of journalism very seriously. After all, my life after graduation depends on it.

This is why I found a column about the future of newspapers, specifically the sports section, so interesting. In a Poynter column, Jason Fry, a freelance reporter and journalism consultant in New York, suggested that like newspapers, traveling to games and game recaps are a dying breed in the sports section.

And he’s right. In a world driven by user content, what the user — or reader — wants, the user gets. It’s not always necessary for a game recap to show up in the paper the morning or day after a game. Readers can get that information instantly from a box score or, perhaps more importantly, from watching highlights and press conferences online immediately after the game.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Jake Batsell, an assistant professor in journalism at Southern Methodist University and faculty adviser to the Daily Mustang. You can read more from Jake on his blog and follow him on Twitter at @jbatsell.

By Jake Batsell

Few of us have experienced the one-of-a-kind wonders of the Galápagos Islands. But if you’re curious and have a half-hour to kill, Pat Davison’s students can take you there.

Once you start exploring, you’ll have a hard time clicking away from “Living Galápagos,” a documentary multimedia project produced last summer by a group of Davison’s photojournalism students at the University of North Carolina.

In my three semesters teaching digital journalism at Southern Methodist University, no multimedia project has inspired more awe and admiration from my students.

As you absorb the site’s vivid images, technical polish and sophisticated storytelling, you can’t help but get fired up about how this new generation of journalists can harness the Web to deliver compelling journalism.

Before departing for the islands, Davison and the students met several times with a coach from a local Web design firm to storyboard the ambitious project, which examines the “battle for balance between man and nature” through dozens of videos, audio slideshows, and panoramic 360-degree photos enhanced with natural sound and interviews.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Pierce Presley, self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Pierce Presley Web Empire,” and a newspaper guy frantically trying to learn new media skills. You can follow him on Twitter at @piercepresley.

By Pierce Presley

I’m in the final semester of my masters program, and I’m working on a capstone professional project that will create a website to give traditionally trained journalists new media skills, so forgive me if I get a little “meta” on you and talk about journalism training. Derek Willis talked in a relatively recent blog post about the future of training offered by Investigative Reporters and Editors, a great organization that he and I recommend journalists join even if their job description doesn’t mention “investigate.” He relates how many people paid their own way to the IRE Conference last year—a sign of how much members value the organization surely, but worrisome because that’s a well that’ll run dry rather quickly—plus how antiquated the several arms of IRE’s training output are, and suggests using video, screencasts, podcasts, YouTube and even the nascent Google Wave as successors. (I think he misses a rather obvious way to update the tipsheet method of spreading knowledge: wikis.)

And while I agree that we should bring to bear any and all of these technologies when they are appropriate to the knowledge being shared, there’s another boat that IRE, the Society of Professional Journalists, and probably most other journalism organizations are missing: virtual conferences.

Anybody who’s been anywhere near the planning and preparation end of a conference knows they’re hell to put on. Between lining up the venue, corralling the speakers, finding food and drink, etc. ad naseum, these things are a testament to the dedication of those who put them on. And all that is for naught if people can’t afford either the time or the money to attend.

But what if there was free or low-cost ways to beam speakers to far-flung attendees, complete with audio, video, PowerPoint and document sharing, and record a copy of the presentation for those who couldn’t “attend” in person? Wouldn’t it be worth the time and the effort to learn the new tech, to find people to present in this new way and to make good journalism training available online?

There is, and of course it would. I’ve attended webinars held by the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and they have been excellent (I learned a lot of useful things, even if I’m not entirely sold on being a business journalist nor a journalistic entrepreneur). Setting up a dozen or two of these wouldn’t be 12 or 24 times harder than doing just the one, and the payoff would be immense.

The thing is, journalism organizations and schools need to start working on this now. Because the longer they wait to offer good, modern content, the more journalists are going to turn away from them and their overpriced, under-rewarding meetings in meatspace. And that will likely mean erosion of the membership rolls, too. That those who can attend will have a definite new-media feather in their cap for the resume (and so will the presenters and organizers) is just a bonus.

IRE, SPJ, everybody trying to teach journalists how to do their job better: start now. Don’t let yourself or anyone tell you that you or the technology aren’t ready yet. As Seth Godin said in Tribes, the enemy of progress isn’t “no.” It’s “not yet.”

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist based in London. You can read more from Adam on his blog, adamwestbrook.wordpress.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamWestbrook.

By Adam Westbrook

Why doesn’t the average consumer pay for news online? We know all the obvious answers: the fact news is free elsewhere; the fact journalists don’t ‘own’ information anymore; and the fact we’re just not prepared to get our credit cards out for micropayments just yet.

But over the last few months I’ve come to a different conclusion: I don’t think we’re happy to pay for news on websites … because it doesn’t look very good.

Think about it: no matter what the story, subject, country, language or website a news story on a web page follows a visual formula. Usually a thin (400-700 pixel wide) central column with two or three thinner columns either side; a headline in big bold letters; the rest of the text in size 10 or 12; the odd sub heading if you’re lucky; and video or photographs squeezed inside the narrow column.

It’s almost always black text on a white background, the images are no more than 200×200 pixels.

When you think about it, it’s quite amazing that after more than five years of web 2.0, when the power of the webpage has grown dramatically,that news organisations are piping out web stories as if it was 1999.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s Guest writer is Alexander Hotz, a multimedia journalist based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @NYCtechnology.

By Alexander Hotz

Blame it on the holiday season or the industry’s own shortcomings, but last week the American press missed a major announcement concerning what could become the future of investigative journalism.

WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that specializes in the publication of classified or restricted information, announced that it’s pursuing an unprecedented avenue to sustain itself. Late last year the whistleblower organization began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform that nation of 300,000 into a beacon of global free expression.

According to WikiLeaks’ reps, the new laws would be modeled on offshore financial centers or tax havens. The British Virgin Islands, for example, attracts the rich with a set of lenient/shady tax laws unavailable in most countries. Iceland, under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

“So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … we could take the First Amendment from the United States, (and) we could take Belgium protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ spokesman Daniel Schmitt at last week’s Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Rick Martin, a Tokyo-based freelance writer. Read more from Rick at www.1rick.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at @1rick.

I’m not a programmer. But these days I’m starting to see how some programming skills can really make a big difference to my productivity as a writer. As I pretty much live inside my RSS readers, I find myself bouncing around between different websites copying and pasting feed links far more than I should. For example, if I want to create RSS feeds for the keyword ‘obama’, I don’t want to have to go to Google News, Yahoo News, Delicious, Flickr, Bing, Youtube and all those other services to retrieve those feeds. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any web service that would produce feeds for a given search term across multiple social media services and news sites.

This was a problem.

Solution: I decided to try to program such a tool on my own. Again I’m not a programmer, but I started with ‘Hello World’ and just researched other snippets of PHP code that I thought would do the job. I’d like to walk you through the process because if you’re new to programming this is a good way to get your feet wet.

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