News sites need to communicate with their readers. Here are 5 great tools that will help you cover the news in a much more dynamic way. All of them have one thing in common: They are extremely easy to implement – even if you have no skills in programming.
Just using text and photos is no longer sufficient in modern web journalism. Readers expect immediacy and interactivity – and new ways of telling stories are developing.
Here are a few tools that I think can be particularly helpful for news sites.
Coveritlive.com – live blogging
This is a free service to add live blogging to your site. It has already been used by a number of big news media, such as Newsweek and Los Angeles Times. Several persons can participate at the same time and messages are updated live on the site. Readers can participate as well – and their comments can be fully moderated before added to the blog. The service allows you to include Twitter feeds as well as photos and videos (for instance by using Qik, see below).
It really is a great tool for any live event you may decide to stage.
At the Norwegian news site Aftenposten we used Coveritlive for the first couple of hours of the Josef Fritzl court hearings in Austria. The live blog consisted of messages from our reporters in Austria, questions from readers, Twitter messages from other journalists, photos from the news wires, background information and also a video report using the service of Qik.
Qik.com - video streaming through the mobile phone
Every news site wants to include video. Yet to do so has been pretty complicated, at least if you are not technical savvy. That was before qik.com. This service is extremely easy to use and allows you to stream video live to your web site through the mobile phone.
Here is what you do: Download the Qik application to your mobile phone and adjust the settings to match your own account at Qik. After you have done this every video you record automatically will be published to your Qik page.
You will also be given an embed code to insert on your own web site. In this way you can include your own video in the article and ensure that the video is published immediately after it was recorded.
I don’t think it is possible to make it much easier than this. Through this system you can have a video published on your web site 30 seconds after it was recorded. The tool is particularly useful when covering live news events.
Twitter.com – micro blogging
Twitter is a very useful tool for journalists. I have explained earlier how it can be used as by journalists in four different ways.
You may also have a look at the following posts:
You can follow me on Twitter at JohnEi. My Twitter messages are usually about online media or related to my other blog Cambodia Tales.
Publish2 – link journalism
This is a tool specifically made for journalists to save, organize and publish links to other articles. A bookmarklet makes it very quick to add new links as you browse the web to find information in your field of expertise.
BetaTales is using this tool to produce the “Betatales reading” list you find in the right column of our pages. Every time I come across an article I want to share with my blog readers, I click the “Link with Publish2″ bookmarklet in my browser. Sometimes I add a small comment. As soon as I hit “Save” the story is included in the listing.
The people behind Publish2 use the term “link journalism” to describe this way of adding links to news articles. One benefit is that several journalists can add links to the same list.
Google maps – add interactive maps to your stories
I would think this is a familiar tool for most of our readers and I will not spend much time describing it here. Google offers an API developers can use to develop their own mashup applications. But even if you are not a programmer, you can easily make your own map at Google maps and then embed it into your article. Using maps really adds great value to many news stories.
Other places to find tools:
- Tips and tools – CyberJournalist.net
- 12 useful online tools for journalists
- 30 important tools for online journalists (in German)
- Essential online tools for journalists
I have only mentioned 5 tools. Many more could have been added. Do you have any suggestions? Please add them in a comment below.
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