When I landed my first full-time reporting gig at The Seattle Times in the 1990s, the Times was still an afternoon paper. A big part of my entry-level GA job was chasing stories that already had appeared in the competition, the morning Post-Intelligencer. Many of my mornings began with an uneasy scan of the P-I, followed by waking up sources with pre-dawn phone calls and hitting the pavement to confirm details the P-I already had.

While I had plenty of friends from the cross-town rival and respected its journalists, as a whole I considered the P-I to be my personal nemesis. If I caught a glimpse of its rotating globe while walking around my neighborhood, I would sometimes reach out and pretend to crush it as I clenched my fist. And whenever I scooped the P-I, it brought a special spring to my step.

Thriving on competition, of course, was part of the fun in a two-newspaper town. And while those storied days are over in most cities, the cutthroat instinct still necessarily prevails in newsrooms paddling to survive in an ever-rising sea of news providers.

But over the course of the past nine months, as I charted the early days of The Texas Tribune for Columbia Journalism Review, I became a believer in cross-newsroom collaboration.

The Tribune, a nonprofit news startup, launched in November with an initial fundraising haul of about $4 million. It freely offers its content to any news outlet that cares to run it, and more than 250 websites and publications have pounced on the offer.

The state’s largest newspapers, however, have been slow to warm to the Tribune, even at a time when shrinking resources are forcing competing papers to share coverage. As I explain in the CJR story, The Dallas Morning News and Austin American-Statesman initially resisted publishing Tribune stories – partly, I suspect, out of pride, but also because editors felt the Tribune’s early content fell short of must-read status.

That perception began to change last month, when the Houston Chronicle teamed with the Tribune on a joint investigation revealing that disabled girls were pitted against each other in a “fight club” at a state-contracted facility. The Statesman and Morning News ran the story in their Sunday print editions, and both papers’ editors have since told me they can envision joining forces with the Tribune down the road. On certain hard-to-get stories, “two news organizations are certainly better than one in pursuing the truth,” said Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen. “We each bring passionate, enterprising reporters to a subject, and the beneficiaries are the voiceless of Texas.”

Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, needs no convincing. He sent the Tribune a check as a founding member last summer and recently told me he hopes to team with the site in time for the November elections and January legislative session. “From the very beginning, I saw them as a partner and not as a competitive threat,” Rivard said. “We haven’t realized the potential of that collaboration yet … Some of the very best journalism being done out in the country these days is being done on a new model. It’s a model that we should embrace.”

As Rivard notes, Pulitzer jurors sent the news industry a clear message in April when awarding a prize to a masterful team project by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. California Watch has had notable early success collaborating with the state’s newspapers, and dot-org pioneer Voice of San Diego partners with the local NBC affiliate on a fact-check feature.

National Public Radio is getting in the act, too. “To increase our impact we at NPR have had to learn to get over ourselves, and to approach collaborations in a new way,” CEO Vivian Schiller told journalists at the IRE conference last month. (Also see: NPR CEO: We want to partner with journalism startups.) And the Seattle Times is among five news organizations joining forces with hyperlocal sites as part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project.

During this new era of collaboration, news outlets also are partnering with universities – the New York Times and New York University are launching a local blog covering the East Village, and the Cronkite News Service at Arizona State University distributes student work all over the state. The student news site I advise at Southern Methodist University shares content with Pegasus News and the Morning News, and we’re talking with the independent student paper about combining operations.

I’m not sure what the business model of the future is, but having competing journalists duplicate each other’s coverage isn’t part of it. Yes, competition can be a motivating force, but teaming up to produce good journalism is an even better incentive.

Jake Batsell is 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.

Landing a plum newsroom job straight out of college has never been an easy feat. But this year’s journalism graduates face a double-barreled challenge: an unusually stingy job market and a growing perception that their generation has a “lax work ethic,” as a Washington Post headline declared last week.

The Post’s story was pegged to the Pew Research Center’s new project on millennials. If you spend time sorting through the Pew research, you’ll find that it even-handedly portrays millennials as “confident,” “connected” and “open to change.” Still, the “spoiled” tag persists. Having spent my 20s trying to defy the Gen X slacker stereotype as I worked to prove myself in metro newsrooms, I can relate to millennials who feel frustrated by pop-culture labels.

I’ve worked with millennials for the past two years teaching digital journalism at Southern Methodist University and advising the SMU Daily Mustang. Newsroom bosses, listen up – here are some things you need to know about your latest crop of entry-level hires:

They respond well to clear expectations.

“Got it.” Those are my two favorite words in the millennial lexicon. When you offer clear instruction to a young journalist and hear those two magic words, you can take it to the bank that they’ll follow through. This is not a rebellious generation. Pew’s research shows that they respect their elders. But if you fail to communicate your expectations clearly and assume they already know things that you take for granted, you could be in for a long day.

They’re creative and adaptable.
It’s a myth that all millennials are technical whizzes – every semester in my digital journalism class, there are a handful of self-proclaimed technophobes. Sure, they live on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they all know how to write a <div> tag in HTML. That said, these “digital natives” are quick studies who love to try new things. This week, I was delighted to discover that two of my students took the initiative to post an instant video report from spring football practice from an iPhone, using free Qik software.

They’re expressive – and they crave feedback.

Anyone who has taught millennials has their favorite doozy of an excuse for missing class. (My favorite was a student who breezily divulged an embarrassing medical condition that I wouldn’t have dared to tell my own professors.) They’ve been raised to freely express themselves, which they do constantly in person and on social networks. And when they work for you, they want your feedback. The strong, silent approach to management is not a great strategy to get the most out of your millennial employees. Let them know where they stand, and how they can improve.

They seek balance.

When discussing the recent Washington Post story with my students, they largely accepted the Pew study’s premise that millennials have a different work ethic than previous generations. After years of watching their parents put work before family, they aren’t so keen to become workaholics themselves. That doesn’t mean this generation is lazy. It’s all about work-life balance. Earlier this semester, a student apologized in advance for having to leave my class early so she could tutor refugee kids. And because millennials have grown up using technology to stay interconnected, they consider it second nature to work in spurts while away from the office. As one 26-year-old activist told the Post, ”It’s not about being at a desk from 9 to 5. I work part of every hour I am awake.”

They want to make a difference.

Today’s j-school students have endured a steady parade of guest speakers — Baby Boomers and Gen Xers — bemoaning the state of the news business. The best young journalists are undaunted by this sense of pessimism. They want to use their multi-platform storytelling skills to do some good. Two recent SMU grads spent part of last summer reporting and blogging from Romanian orphanages. This week, students at campuses around the country went barefoot for a day to raise awareness of kids around the world who don’t have any shoes. One of our recent alums helped start an orphanage in Uganda. Millennials are altruistic and want to give back, and they see journalism as a great way to do that.

Editors or professors, what tips and experiences do you have from working with millennial journalists? Please add to the conversation below with your comments.

Jake Batsell is 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.

There’s a lot of hope for newspapers in capturing some of the emerging (exploding?) mobile market in the coming months and years as phones get smarter and people begin to rely on them more and more for information.

But despite the best of intentions, most small newsrooms aren’t prepared to go mobile and no amount of technology is going to get them there. The biggest impediment is the single-deadline mindset of publications that still cling mightily to shovelware posted after print pages are sent to press. It hasn’t ever fit the Web and it’s even more glaring in a mobile world.

Shoveling content to the Web in the middle of the night is, sadly, still the norm for lots of newsrooms. My organization is still one of them even though we’ve made a major effort to train everyone in the newsroom to post their own work and keep hounding everyone about it.

For us, the biggest reasons that shovelware has such a grip include:

• perception that posting to the Web is yet another duty tacked onto an already overworked staff
• resentment about the Web stealing circulation from print, so the online effort is half-assed at best
• fear of technology and content editors that enable the technologically challenged to remain that way

Aside from institutional inertia, I also think there’s a lack of understanding in how different the experience of news is online and in print.

Years ago now, I read a post by Doc Searls about the live Web, which summed up the fundamental difference between traditional publications and new media beautifully. In discussing why an unnamed industry found itself asking why it had so few visitors to their sites:

…Their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit…
The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.

As a flyfisher, I can’t help but think of things in terms of rivers. Rivers are made up of water collected from streams spread out over a broad area. There’s a saying that you can’t ever stand in the same river twice: they’re always fresh, always moving.

Modern journalism is as much about how the story unfolds as it is the story itself. It’s about taking a stream of information going by the reader and directing a flow of relevant stuff their way when and how they want it. Newspapers are great for constructing information. So let each medium play to its strengths.

I’m convinced that once the difference is clear, the roadblocks will fall away. Here are some strategies we’re using (or plan to use) to get one-deadliners used to an information stream:

• Scheduling posts throughout the day. There’s no reason that your letters and opinions can’t be made available whenever they’re ready. In our case, we give a little deference to the print product and schedule them at 9 a.m. Same with obituaries, but at a different time.
• Stress to reporters that publishing incremental stories to the Web doesn’t have to be extra work. Teach them how it’s part of the process.
• Teach bloggers how to turn their blogs from unfocused pastimes into powerful and flexible reporting platforms and testing grounds.

It’s an ongoing challenge, but hopefully the potential for mobile revenue and readership will encourage some fundamental rethinking.

Has your organization tackled the stream vs. architecture challenge? What strategies worked for you?

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.

When a high-profile trial hits town, today’s Web readers expect real-time coverage. But what does that mean for the courts reporter who also has to absorb, interpret and report the fine points of the case?

Last week in my Digital Journalism class, I led a Columbia University case study examining the Bakersfield Californian’s Web coverage of a quintuple-murder trial in 2007. The young reporter was under pressure from her editors to blog from the courtroom as often as every 10 minutes. Errors sneaked into the copy, and the blog updates mostly amounted to a blow-by-blow transcript.

In their written reactions to the case, many of my students were alarmed that the Californian allowed the reporter to directly publish her blog posts with no editing. And the students were skeptical that any reporter could file so many real-time updates without hurting the quality of the main stories for the newspaper and Web.

“As a journalist, and frequent news reader, I would rather have accurate and thoughtful information every few hours, rather than irrelevant, thoughtless information every ten minutes,” one student wrote.

Another student observed: “It seems brash to require such short publication in such an important case. No matter how good a journalist [the reporter] is, mistakes will always be made especially without the oversight of an editor.”

“Balancing the blog and daily posts to the blog as well as the news column on the trial is a lot to focus on all at once,” another student added.

So, is it possible for one human being to accurately cover a big trial in real time on the Web, while simultaneously crafting a front-page story?

“It is possible,” said Jason Trahan, federal courts reporter for The Dallas Morning News, who on Friday wrapped up his award-winning print and Web coverage of a Dallas City Hall corruption trial. (Full disclosure: the writer is a former staff writer and video journalist at the Dallas Morning News.)

Trahan was a fixture on page 1A last summer during three months of arguments, evidence and testimony. But he also continuously filed Web dispatches, either by live blogging or by posting individual updates every hour or so, a form Trahan calls “live blogging lite.”

He describes the experience as invigorating but mentally exhausting.

“It takes a toll,” Trahan said. “It’s like driving 1,000 miles without getting a break.”

His success, though, is reflected in the numbers: As many as 3,000 people tuned in for the daily live-blog sessions, and his individual posts drew hundreds of reader comments.

Trahan used his laptop and iPhone to cover the trial via a closed-circuit feed in an overflow room at the courthouse. The Dallas Bar Association specifically praised his trial blog coverage when handing him an award for legal reporting, and he also was named the paper’s 2009 Beat Reporter of the Year.

He said blogging throughout the day forced him to be more mentally focused during testimony, which then allowed him to “mine” from his blog entries at the end of the day while writing his newspaper stories.

“It is more work, but you are engaged way more in the process than if you were just sitting there with a notebook and a pen and filing one finished product at the end of the day,” he said. “It’s almost like working for your own miniature wire service.”

And Trahan adds, “In this day and age, when they’re cutting newsroom staff rather than adding to it, it’s just a matter of reality.”

His advice for rookie trial bloggers: Don’t try to include everything. You’ll drive yourself crazy.

“You have to have the confidence to say, ‘Enough is enough. I’m leaving that out,’ ” he said.

Trahan, who is married with four children, said he enjoyed developing his voice as a beat blogger during the city hall trial. But yes, he’s relieved that it’s over.

“It’s hard as hell, and you go home just spent,” he said. “But it’s possible.”

Jake Batsell is 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.

Want to power search Twitter and find local users or what people are saying about local issues? Try Topsy, which Techcrunch says is more powerful than Twitter’s own search engine.

Want to mine the social graph and figure out who the real power brokers are on your beat? If they’re on Twitter, you can use HiveMind, Follower Wonk and Twiangulate to track them down, according to this ReadWriteWeb post: Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph.

And from Lifehacker, a recommendation for a Chrome extension called Twitter Reactions that will show you the most recent tweets about a web page you’re visiting (or have published).

If you have other recommendations for finding people or relevant conversations through social media, please offer them in the comments.

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.

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.

But before we dive into the happy intricacies of aggregating, a quick word of warning for Drupal noobs out there. This can be a really tough CMS to get your head around, but once you get over the hump you’ll be fascinated by the possibilities. If you have trouble wrapping your head around their documentation, have a look at my notes about the problems I ran into getting started with Drupal.

Now, back to the aggregating…

There are a few ways to aggregate in Drupal (Note: I’ll be talking about Drupal 6, but keep in mind that 7 is on the way). My preferred methods are via the following menu items:

1. administer > content management > feed aggregator (example.com/admin/content/aggregator)

2. administer > create content > feed (example.com/node/add/feed)

You can use either of these to aggregate content, but I’ll leave it up to you.

Collecting photos and links for your city

My friend Alex who manages DalianDalian.com (all about city of Dalian China) first showed me what kind of power Drupal had when he started sucking in Flickr photos that local photographers were voluntarily tagging as ‘daliandalian‘.

The beauty of this sort of aggregation is that you are encouraging users to contribute to your site without making them leave the platforms where they live. Remember this point because it’s important. Most of your users might already be on Facebook, Twitter, or their own blog — and they might not be willing to add one more website to the ones they visit daily. Giving them an option like this just makes sense.

Similarly Alex encouraged Delicious users to tag Dalian-specific news on the web as ‘daliandalian‘, which was then collected on site. Using the RSS feeds for certain Delicious tags can be an awesome way to share such links. If you don’t want to aggregate all public links for a certain tag (there is of course a risk that some users will spam this feed), you can always use your own personal tag (i.e. http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/YOURUSERNAME/YOURTAG?count=15). Anyone who uses Publish2 could easily use a tag feed from there as well (example: my Dalian feed).

Get Wordpress bloggers to crosspost to your Drupal site

Drupal also has the power for users to add their own blog feed (see example.com/node/add/feed). Say for example that you have a Drupal site about Barcelona, Spain. Maybe you know of lots of Spain-focused Wordpress blogs you can aggregate from, but you would be getting all kinds of undesirable information about places other than Barcelona. The solution here is to encourage those Wordpress bloggers to create a Barcelona category for any information that they write about Barcelona. You can then take the feeds for their Barcelona categories, and display them on your Drupal site. Again, this allows users to contribute to your website from the comfort of their own blog. To see this feed magic in action, check out the Dalian category of my China blog which I’ve fed into DalianDalian.com allowing me to cross-post there.

Keep in mind that not all Wordpress blogs display the category feeds, but rest assured that they have them. Here are the url structures to follow, just in case you need them:

• http://www.example.com/?cat=42&feed=rss2
• http://www.example.com/?tag=tagname&feed=rss2
• http://example.com/category/categoryname/feed

Proceed with caution

It will be interesting to see how aggregation changes as we move to Drupal 7 and Wordpress 3.0, because the mechanics behind the scenes are likely to get easier. If you decide to plunge into content aggregation, try to be wise and responsible in your role as an information curator because the manner in which you do so will affect your trustability and reputation.

Rick Martin is a Tokyo-based freelance writer. Read more from Rick at www.1rick.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at @1rick.

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.”

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.

The standard 3-column layout on the CNN and BBC News websites.

One thing then is becoming clear: if people are going to pay for journalistic content in a digital form, it’s going to have to look good, not just read good.

We’re already starting to see technical innovation (and the fruits of this innovation) in magazines.

Think about why people buy magazines: the content, sure; but magazines are about a little bit more. They’re often a lifestyle choice, something to have on the coffee table – and something that looks good. It’s why magazines spend money on designers and graphics teams. It pays off.

Take the German magazine WELT am SONNTAG. In November they showed off a new digital edition, and its focus is on good design as well as good content:

Every page is designed individually for the story. It’s packed with high quality photographs, innovative interactive layouts and great data visualisation. Think for a second what value this adds to your consumption of the story.

The reader can explore pages as they choose and have a real interactive experience. Why can’t newspapers and other mainstream media harness this?

In December a British design agency unveiled its ideas for a new magazine e-reader.

Called Mag+ it resembles Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s feted tablet, but is designed with the magazine reader in mind.

“The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reader experience in which high quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories” they explain.

Could this technology help newspapers too? I think so.

We’re seeing innovative design invade the blogosphere too, with the rise of what are already being coined “Blogazines”. Web designers with the time, talent and determination are showing the potential of individually designed blog entries. Take for example British designer Gregory Wood’s unique homepage and the website of Dustin Curtis. They treat every blog post as a new creative challenge.

And it looks great.

There are downsides, of course. It’s a far more time consuming way of telling stories, and at a time when journalists are being laid off, hiring designers with macs and square glasses won’t go down very well. And it isn’t the way forward for all news publications. We still want the facts, fast, in black and white.

So what tools can publications harness to inject life into their articles?

The ones with money will want to hire in specialist designers probably, ones with the know-how of Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop.

There is, however, nothing to stop the enterprising journalist learning these for him or herself (think how much more employable you would become!)

Others are outsourcing to specialist companies. For example US platform Flyp Media has been commissioned to produce some pretty impressive pieces, among them The Scientific American’s ‘Powering a Green Planet’.

On their website Flyp don’t shy away from their ambitious aims:

“FLYP is a dynamic online, multimedia magazine that combines text, video, audio, animation and interactivity into a new kind of storytelling.”

And a new kind of storytelling is what is at stake here. Because making your website look pretty isn’t just style over substance. It opens up a new landscape of narrative and storytelling to the journalist. It adds untold value to your content.

And perhaps, just perhaps that’s enough to get them to open their wallets again.

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.

In a nutshell, my tool would take the link structures for RSS feeds like this:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/KEYWORD.rss

and replace the ‘keyword’ with a term that you would like to monitor using a simple string replacement command. So if you input ‘obama’, you get:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/obama.rss

First we’ll need to whip up an index.html file to hold our input form, and a feeds.php file to display the feed results. To make these you can use your favorite text editor. Today I’m using Smultron. So lets get started!

Step 1. Create index.html and add basic html tags.

Step 2: Add a search form to index.html

This form will prompt the user to enter the keyword that they want to generate a feed for. So for example, if I want to monitor news about ‘obama’, I will enter ‘obama’ into the text input box. You can also add some explanatory text for the user just before the form if you wish. But I’ll leave that up to you. If you’d like to get an idea how this form will look in a webpage, skip ahead to the final step.

Step 3: Create the ‘feed results’ page

You might have noticed the ‘feeds.php’ reference in the form above. We’ll make that page now. So create ‘feeds.php’.

After you’ve done that, you’ll need to declare the RSS feed link structures for your favorite media services. I’m going to use Delicious, Google News, Google Blogs, Yahoo News, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. For each RSS link, I’ll assign a variable. So for the YouTube feed that I mentioned above, I’ll call that ‘$youtube’. So now the ‘$youtube’ variable will be representing the string of text that makes up the RSS link http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/KEYWORD.rss.

Notice that I’m using REPLACEME as the keyword in all of these links, because I’m planning to substitute in the string of text that the user inputs in the text box. Simple, right?

Step 4: Replace ‘REPLACEME’ with ‘SEARCHTERM’

Now we’re going to do a simple string replacement command to replace all instances of ‘REPLACEME’ with the user-inputted text. This will generate new RSS feed links that we can then use however we choose. Note that I’m assigning a new variable to the resulted links. So our old link template, $youtube, now becomes $youtubenew, and so on down the line for all the media services.

Step 5: Get ready to display feed results

So we’ve generated the feeds we wanted. But we still haven’t displayed them yet. So let’s do that now. Add html, head, and body tags. You can add some meta info and CSS if you like as well. We’re almost done!

Step 6: Display feed results in unordered list

A simple unordered list will do to display the new generated feeds. We’re going to do a simple ‘echo’ command to print out the new feeds here. Be sure to close out your body and html tags at the end of the document.

Step 7: Test it out!

I have a working version of this tool on my website. But you can easily upload the index.html and feeds.php files to a subdirectory on your own website and use it from there.

I really prefer to use it embedded in a Netvibes page via the webpage widget (see below), because then I can generate feeds for a desired term and copy and paste the resultant feeds directly into a new Netvibes page. It’s very handy when creating media monitoring ‘dashboards’.

Taking it one step further

Ideally I’d like this tool to parse the ten most recent items for each feed generated. SimplePie might be a good solution for this, and to that end I’ve been trying to absorb this awesome tutorial from wunderkind Tom Rogers. Unfortunately the feeds aren’t quite playing nice yet, but I’ll keep working on it.

I’ve also been experimenting creating feeds for sites that don’t have any feeds. For this I’ve been generating RSS feeds using Dapper.net, an absolutely wonderful data scraping service. This string replacement function doesn’t always work with their links though, so your milage may vary.

Some final thoughts

I’m sure that all my code above wasn’t the most efficient or elegant, but the end result does make research a lot easier for me. If there are more seasoned programmers out there, I invite your feedback (please be gentle). For the noobs out there, I really encourage you to try adding some programming skills to your repertoire. I guarantee that you’ll start thinking about problems differently once you have a new set of tools in your box.

And if that doesn’t convince you that programming is a skill every journalist should have, check out my friend Chris who programmed his awesome Tools For News site from scratch and landed a job as a result. It’s a damn inspiring story and I’d likely not have given programming a second look if it weren’t for Chris’s fun projects.

Admittedly, programming is not the easiest thing to learn from scratch. But for those who want to give it a try, I have assembled some beginning resources on my blog that will help you learn programming from scratch. And if you have any resources that have worked well for you, I’d love to hear them.

I’m hoping to launch a local Tokyo site over the next few weeks, and this feed generator tool will certainly help out contributors who need to monitor local news their corner of Tokyo. Similarly, I hope it helps some of you readers out there as well.

NOTE: Here are the source files if you want to play around with them or install them on your own site: http://1rick.com/feedtoolsrc