Today's journalists have little choice but to do more with less. Some free online tools would be pretty handy then, wouldn't they?
Below are 10 free tools journalists can use to gather, produce or deliver news. This list is by no means exhaustive and is not a top 10, but it provides an idea of all the cool, useful tools out there and of how to use familiar tools in potentially unfamiliar ways.
I expanded upon this list in a workshop I recently conducted with a high school journalism class, video of which I plan to post here over the coming week. The workshop was built around this blog post by newspaper chain Journal Register Company's new CEO John Paton. Paton's compiling his own list of free tools for his company's innovative Ben Franklin Project.
Full disclosure: I used to report for Journal Register Company property the Daily Freeman.
1. Twitter
What is it?- Share short messages (140 characters or fewer). "Follow" users (you don't need their permission) to get their "tweets" to appear in your stream.
- Gathering, distributing and discovering news.
2. Posterous
What is it?
- E-mail text, photos, videos or mp3s to post@posterous.com and Posterous formats them into professional-looking, permalinked blog-style posts and serializes them in a permalinked stream. No signup is required but creating a profile lets you edit or delete your posts.
- Quickly sharing information with colleagues, sources and audiences. Publishing content to multiple social media platforms in one fell swoop.
3. Audacity
What is it?
- Cross-platform audio editing and recording software (requires download). Trim, combine, rearrange, enhance and create audio clips and output them in popular formats including .mp3 and .wav.
- Preparing audio for podcasts, photo slideshows, videos, presentations and other multimedia.
4. WordPress.com
What is it?
- Open source blogging platform. Ease of use, active community, hundreds of free themes, dozens of widgets, search-engine friendliness make WordPress a blogging powerbrand.
- Creating and hosting blogs and even full-fledged Web sites.
5. YouTube
What is it?
- The world's largest video sharing Web site. View millions of online videos without signing up and publish an unlimited amount of videos after creating a free account.
- Sharing videos (both on YouTube, and, if you choose, in an embedded player on your site), discovering news content, spreading content beyond your traditional audience.
6. Splashup
What is it?
- Photo editing software — like a lite version of Photoshop. Import images from your hard drive or directly from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook or Photobucket.
- Simple photo edits and enhancements like cropping, resizing, adding text, adjusting brightness and contrast, basic filters.
7. Chartle.net
What is it?
- Input data, make some design choices and instantly publish professional-looking, embeddable interactive charts, graphs, maps and diagrams.
- Illustrating stories that involve data or complex relationships.
8. Flickr
What is it?
- Photography-minded picture sharing community. Powerful, intuitive interface simplifies management of large photo collections.
- Showcasing photojournalistic work, crowdsourcing photojournalistic coverage, connecting with other users, managing photos, finding Creative Commons licensed material for reuse.
9. Google Wave
What is it?
- Collaborative platform where users can share text, links, files, maps, simple polls and more in real time and playback all or part of the "conversation" later on (in preview, invite required).
- Virtual meetings, colloborating on projects including news stories, project management, crowdsourcing news coverage, community discussions.
10. CoveritLive
What is it?- Full-service, plug-and-play live news coverage platform. Share text, pictures, polls, data and live video and moderate user responses in real time all in a self-contained viewer.
- Covering events and breaking news, conducting chats with colleagues or audience members, streaming live video.
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