Digital tools help produce quality content online, but it can be tough figuring out where to start. Here are 10 online tools that can help improve journalists’ reporting and storytelling, and engage readers in multimedia.
Reporting resources: These tools can … Read more
Terrible events such as yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon have always meant “all hands on deck” for news organizations, with staffers pulled off their regular beats to contribute.
But the endpoint of the newsgathering and reporting is no longer … Read more
Just three developers worked throughout most the night to get Buzzfeed.com back up and running [in the cloud on Amazon Web Services]. One of them, Eugene Ventimiglia, kept working even after a tree fell through the roof of his home in North New Jersey.Of course, AWS cloud hosting has had its own failures when weather or power outages affected its server farms in Northern Virginia. So it's probably smart for news orgs to have layers of backup plans.
“It took years to build (Buzzfeed) and they rebuilt it in six hours,” Smith said.
Good video stories need strong individual shots. Great video stories present those shots in a sequence that complements the parts and creates a much greater whole.
Shooting and editing effective sequences are essential video storytelling skills. Shot sequences can enhance … Read more
When The Huffington Post’s David Wood won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on wounded veterans, Michael Calderone called it a “milestone in the influential Pulitzer committee’s recognition of online-only news organizations.”
But when you look at the recent history … Read more
Andy Boyle to news sites: Stop differentiating between blogs and articles
“It’s time to stop bifurcating your content as blogs and news because they run on separate systems. It is all content, so why not call it that? Even if you have outside people writing posts on your website that are unmoderated by your staff — that’s still content that’s part of your media outlet’s website. …
“If it’s opinion content, call it that. If it’s news content, great! That’s what it is. Start thinking of it all as content as opposed to ‘this is a blog post’ and ‘this is a news story.’ If you copied a news story and pasted it into a blog post, DOES IT SOMEHOW CHANGE? No. It does not.”
It’s not easy to craft a strategy for starting and growing blogs on a news website. But it is important. Blogs can be a magnet to attract a loyal audience around the most important subjects, and can improve the whole … Read more
As news organizations embrace Twitter and Facebook to distribute stories and engage their audiences, many have decided social media is no longer a one-person job.
Effective social media use now requires that you post and monitor almost all the time … Read more
The mobile advertising market is booming. Total U.S. mobile ad spending is expected to rise from almost $800 million last year to $4 billion in 2015. This sounds great to publishers hoping to build mobile revenue streams.
Links are the signposts of the Internet. Without them, we lose readers. This may seem counterintuitive, especially when it comes to external links. But when links are properly placed, they send people deeper into Post content. With external links, we guide readers — with one click — to the report we are quoting or the story from another source we are referencing. With a simple link, we avoid sending readers on a frustrating journey to learn more about what we are already writing about.Then the memo gives practical instructions. It calls on reporters and other content creators to take the lead in adding links, not to leave it to editors, and provides three best practices: