My colleague Mario Starks recently pointed me to a rockin’ new Firefox plugin called iMacros, which lets you automatically run a whole host of repetitive tasks in your browser. My immediate thought was how this tool is perfect for monitoring competitors by loading multiple web [...]
As I stared at my bookshelf this evening, I got to thinking about the books I most often recommend to online journalism colleagues and workshop participants. I figure my pals in the blogosphere might find such a list useful as well. Each of these five books either fundamentally changed my [...]
Your inbox doesn’t have to be a scary place. These five tips can help you cope with hordes of e-mail.
You’ve probably felt that drowning feeling on a Monday morning when you open up Microsoft Outlook and the enormous pile of e-mail from last week is [...]
Hey folks, just wanted to post the handouts I’ll be giving out at the two FSNE multimedia workshops I’ll be leading this afternoon in Tampa. One session is on blogging and the other is on new online media tools. Here are the handouts, as well as my slideshow for [...]
To those of you who said “Google News isn’t a media competitor! It’s just an aggregator:” I give you AdWords on Google News.
I’ve previously written about how Google News was generating more than $100 million in revenue, according to a Google VP.
I’ve written about how Google’s Knol [...]
The Google News team today published a list of tips on its official blog for making sure publishers’ content is optimized for inclusion in Google News. Here’s a quickfire version of their list:
-Keep the article body clean
Avoid strange tags, ads, sidebars, etc.
-Make sure article URLs [...]
A group of online technology enthusiasts listens in on a presentation at BarCamp Orlando in 2007. The event is now in its third year. [Photo by Josh Hallett ]
In the next few months, yours truly’s calendar is jam-packed with all sorts of great online media [...]
David Cohn has posted a great series of interviews with several media innovators over at his blog. But there is one particular piece of advice from Cohn’s interview with Adrian Holovaty (4:15 in) that I think needs to be heard by both aspiring journalists and seasoned professionals, no [...]
Some day, I’ll tell you folks the story of how I accidentally launched my online journalism career by building a seat-of-the-pants web site for the Hispanic Student Association in college using Adobe GoLive 6.0 (don’t make fun of me, dammit!).
In the meantime, XKCD says it best:
Want to see how more than 100 major national and international news sites covered the inauguration of Barack Obama? Visit the Flickr photo gallery I put together to see screenshots of news sites’ home pages immediately after Obama was sworn in. (UPDATE: I sucked it up and bought a [...]
Learning the skills to “do it yourself” can help you keep your online media job in these tough times and possibly get you an even better gig. [Photo by Tommy Huynh]
If you’re a web worker at a news site, you may recall a day [...]
Count on the fact that some of the journalism work living on your news site will go up in smoke. To protect yourself, make sure you’re keeping digital copies of your portfolio. [Photo by Mr. Peebles]
Journo/developer Joe Murphy has a terrific post today with tips [...]
GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit Monday against the New York Times Co. alleging copyright infringement after the NYT-owned Boston Globe frequently posted links containing headlines and the first sentences from articles on GateHouse’s community news sites.
-View the Document: The 25-page lawsuit [PDF]
-View the Document:Â Request [...]
A 2008 study released by The Bivings Group showed that newspaper web sites increasingly embraced user content and comments, launched reporter-written blogs and shied away from requiring registration to read articles.
The Bivings report, titled The Use of the Internet by America’s Newspapers [PDF], attempts to quantify how the [...]
Many handymen have a favorite wrench or drill they adore and always keep with them. Well, journo-geeks are no exception.
Below is a shortlist of more than 25 of my favorite (and mostly free) multimedia tools. I put together this list for a session on new media tools that I led [...]
The Committee to Protect Journalists released an eye-opening report, which says that 56 of the 125 accounted-for jailed journalists in the world are bloggers and other online workers. It is the first year that online journalists account for the largest category of journalists being imprisoned in the world — [...]
Blog seach engine Technorati has released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere, a study that surveys 1,079 bloggers regarding their posting habits, demographics, use of advertising and numerous other topics.
Mindy McAdams over at Teaching Online Journalism has done a fantastic job of boiling down some of the most [...]
The folks over at TypePad are offering free pro blogging accounts to journalists and former journalists under the moniker of a “Journalist Bailout Program” (har, very funny fellas). The free plan –which typically costs $14.95 a month– offers technical support, hosting and use of TypePad’s [...]
The New York Times Shifting Careers blog has an article that should be of interest to writers and web designers who are thinking of going the freelance route. Michelle Goodman, author of ‘My So-Called Freelance Life,’ has written a guest post outlining how doing freelance work for free –in [...]
I’m taking a break! As you may recall, yours truly got married back in July, but Mrs. Journalistopia and I never got to go on our honeymoon. So we’re off on a two-week romp through Europe! We’re flying tomorrow to Venice for a night, then on to [...]
Hey Journalistopians, opportunity is a-knockin’! The Orlando Sentinel, my esteemed employer, has a job opening for a rockin’ Flashionista multimedia artist (who just so happens to share the cube next to me). Additionally, the Sun-Sentinel, our sister paper down in South Florida, has an opening for a web developer.
So if [...]
I’m a big fan of optimizing headlines for search engines so they can be found, but sometimes sites go too far. At the moment, there are unverified rumors crawling around the Internet that actor James Earl Jones died. So I did a search on Google News. Check out this piece [...]
Any of you developers want to get cracking on this idea for news site comments? Pretty please? Original comic from XKCD here.
[XKCD - Listen to Yourself]
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If at some point you peeked over at my reading list on the right rail of this blog, you’ll have noticed that I’m currently engaged in learning the Django web development framework for Python (with invaluable help from some talented folks). To [...]
[UPDATE: There are actually six workshops taking place at the University of Miami. Check out BeyondBootcamp.org for the complete listings. (Thanks to RIck Beckman from UM for the heads up.)]
The infamous multimedia boot camp at the University of North Carolina is now coming to the University of Miami [...]
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Being a sharp online editor means keeping a close watch on your competitors. [Photo by 
