I do research and support users at an SF startup. On the side, I dabble in digital journalism and have worked on raising the bar on the demand side of journalism at Mediactive.
Updated: I added several resources as well as text to show device support. I also clarified the introduction a bit.
A great discussion began on Quora asking “What apps should every journalist have on their iPhone?” Both professional journalists and recreational reporters jumped in on the discussion with enough suggestions to cover most bases when you need to capture news and publish it quickly from a mobile device. While not all are as useful to non-professional journalists, having some of the same apps available can serve the you well in the pursuit to be an active media participant.
For this post, I’ve pulled from the best suggestions there and have added some of my own. I’ve also added Android alternatives to iPhone-only apps. I’ll be updating the Resources section with more mobile apps and welcome your suggestions in the comments.
Apps that improve phone calls and SMS
Actual phone calls and SMS (text messages) are already the killer apps of mobile. However, they can be enhanced by some useful applications.
Apps that improve consumption
While individual news organizations are creating great applications of their own, RSS and Twitter clients are still a great way to customize your news consumption experience.
Apps that improve note taking
While many note applications exist, here are a couple good places to start. Much will depend with personal preference over time, but features to look for are organization, tagging, search capability and the ability to sync to the cloud and other devices.
Apps for recording
The photo, video and audio capturing bases can be covered with just a few good apps. Here are several to start with.
Apps for publishing
Many of the recording apps have their own publishing features built-in. However, the apps listed below help you interact with other publishing tools through your mobile device.
Apps that do other useful things
Many, many more apps are out there with promising journalistic applications. Jump in on the comments and tell us what you’ve found to help you consume and create media.
When in the field, you can be limited by computers you don’t control. Limitations can be as simple as a library computer without Adobe Reader installed or as complex as a third-world internet cafe where the machines have few applications and none in your language. A USB drive pre-loaded with your own software is a simple workaround, but I haven’t yet run across a collection of portable software packaged especially for the field journalist.
To meet this need, I’ve gathered a range of portable applications one can run from a USB drive. This is version 1 and will develop based on use and suggestions. I chose the initial set with this criteria in mind:
The how-to for setting up your own USB drive is below, but first, let me list the applications:
Platform:
PortableApps Platform – PortableApps.com offers an extremely useful foundation for portable software. It sets up your USB drive (or even an iPod) for installing and running other portable applications. It runs on Windows, but can be run on Linux and OSX via Wine. I started with the platform alone without other applications added. However, you can download the platform with lots of extras as well.
Consumption:
Firefox – Other browsers can be portable as well, but I chose Firefox for its universality.
Universal Viewer – This very handy app can view most document and image types and easily covers the doc, pdf and odt bases.
VLC Media Player – VLC plays both audio files and most video formats.
Creation:
Audacity – This covers simple audio editing.
GIMP – This image editor is an open-source alternative to Photoshop.
Inkscape – This vector image editor is a simple alternative to Illustrator.
KompoZer – Though not as robust as Dreamweaver, this web editor covers a lot of bases.
Notepad++ – This is a text editor that can also highlight code. It’s useful for quick edits to HTML and CSS files.
FileZilla – This is an open-source FTP client.
VirtualDub – I’m still sifting through portable video-editing options, but this one should suffice for now. Codec installations in general make adding a portable video editor a bit more involved.
Utilities:
Skype – Other IM clients are available as well. Skype offers voice and is well-saturated.
Eraser – A simple privacy utility for ensuring documents erased on a public machine are gone for good.
How to Set Up Your Field Journalist USB Drive:
This is just the first version and I’m still exploring portable applications. I’m very interested in suggestions for applications you prefer to those on this initial list or programs that fill other gaps. If you know of similar projects for journalistic purposes, I’m very interested in that as well.
Photo via DavidRGilson’s Flickr stream.
iMapFlickr offers a fast approach to mapmaking if you geocode your Flickr images. Just enter a Flickr ID, user URL or even the e-mail address you use for Flickr and iMapFlickr will generate a Google map tagged with photo locations. The tool allows you to choose from your photo sets and offers some convenient customization options for the embedding the map elsewhere. Map dimensions, picture sizes and tag icons can all be adjusted.
iMapFlickr doesn’t show support for Flickr groups yet, but there is already potential here for journalistic collaborations. As long as photos are public, one can create maps from another user’s collection. So, one collaborator could upload pictures to her Flickr account and others could customize and embed the maps from that account without directly accessing it.
Take note that geotags have their own privacy levels on Flickr and the location data must be shared publicly for iMapFlickr to work. Check out this video if you’re unsure how to geotag Flickr photos. Also, maps may be tricky on WordPress due to iframes. Fixes are explained here.
The example shot is made from sockeyed‘s set of the Vancouver Bicycle Music Festival.
MobileActive.org is a go to place for info on cell phone usage and tools. In 2009, MobileActive received a Knight News Challenge grant to build the Mobile Media Toolkit, a database of tools and how-to guides for those using mobile phones for social change.
Part of this toolkit is a directory of mobile phone statistics that functions as something like a CIA factbook for mobile. Selecting a country, one can see mobile costs, saturation amongst the population and regional providers. For example, I can see that around 41% of Chinese citizens use mobile phones and they pay about 1 US cent on average for an SMS (as of 2007-2008). This is helpful data as one decides how to develop applications for different regions of the world.
As well, MobileActive offers a database of mobile phone applications, case studies and how-to guides. These range in purpose from citizen media to advocacy and are extremely fresh with most additions occurring in 2009-2010.
Finally, MobileActive’s sense of purpose emerges in its news about global uses of mobile. Recent articles tell stories about a 20-village news network in rural India and anonymous cell phone videos from Iran. Katrin Verclas, MobileActive’s co-founder, expresses the heart behind the project in this video:
Readability is a worthwhile browser application if you want to focus you’re attention on a site’s text and winnow out the advertising and widget chaff. It’s pretty straightforward. Add the bookmarklet here to your browser’s bookmarks and click it when you want signal without the noise. The application will pull the text from the page and display it in a typographically-friendly format. Here’s an example of the most recent Mediactive post:
I’m interested to hear who finds this helpful and who doesn’t. So, send feedback. My only qualm at this point is long form articles without imagery can cause me to start to glaze over a bit. I think the Internet has ruined me for traditional books and lengthy text without immediate distraction nearby.
Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference and kept my eyes open for topics related to media literacy. Thoughts on media consumption and creation show up in the multitude of lectures, panels, bootcamps and roundtables dedicated to the study and creation of games. Here are some things I gleaned:
Serious Games Summit
Several interesting things came up at the Serious Games Summit, which is the session track for examining games used for purposes other than entertainment (not that entertainment isn’t a worthy goal itself). Here are the highlights:
Game Writers’ Roundtable
Several worthwhile tips came out of a roundtable of both professional and amateur game writers. Here are the ones that apply well to digital media creation.
Farmville
Social games were a hot topic at the GDC this year, both for the massive jump in people playing these games and for their lucrative nature. I sat in on a session with Mark Skaggs of Farmville where he explained the game’s development process. Farmville itself has been a bit of a phenomenon and a rather controversial one.
Most interesting for Mediactive’s purposes are the rapid creation and development of Farmville. According to Skaggs, the initial team was composed of less than ten people and was developed in five weeks. From the point of release, the game acquired about 1,000,000 new users per week, an above-expectations rate. This critical mass gave the team lots of data, which informed the design going forward. Skaggs explained “fun” as something hard to measure, while behavior could be tracked by clicks. When strawberries received a large number of clicks, the team created “Super Berries” and the resulting popularity nearly crashed the server. This is just one example, but every game action and click was evaluated for new direction in content.
I see a couple lessons here that apply to digital media:
Beyond what I’ve covered here. I ran into some interesting tools for media creation, which I’ll be testing and posting to the Tools page. Games and interactive environments are ripe for experimentation when it comes to new media and I’m excited to see what emerges over time.
I’ll be at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week and I’d like your suggestions on what to cover. Games and interactivity are a large part of contemporary media and the ability to both engage with and create within this rapidly-evolving medium become more important.
You can see the conference’s schedule here. Hot topics this year are social games, geolocation, smartphone applications and augmented reality. As well, something like the Serious Games summit examines the use of games for not purely entertainment reasons. So, if the GDC interests you, add suggestions for sessions or topics you’d like me to cover to the comments section.
After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin that adds proofreading functionality to the WordPress dashboard. Once added, the plugin will highlight grammar, style and spelling errors while you write posts. Similar to Word, errors are color coded by type and right-clicking will bring up suggestions for correction. It’s not 100% (it didn’t catch a there/their misuse I tested), but like any proofreading support, it should be a safeguard instead of a brain replacement. The plugin is only available for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The following video shows After the Deadline in action:
Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.
NewsTrust gives its community tools to evaluate news stories. Users can add news articles they find, rating them by journalistic standards such as fairness, sourcing and depth. This format readily lends itself to teaching news literacy and evaluation. Recognizing this, NewsTrust offers a nice set of teacher guides.
The guides, aimed at high school and college-level students, are broken down between news and opinion. The teacher guide is broken down into a 45-minute lesson plan, while the student guide offers an example story and questions that zero in on qualities like facts and fairness. Additional activities are offered as well.
If you like the guides and want to go more in depth, NewsTrust offers an additional page of external educational resources geared toward news literacy.
You never know when you’ll need to chop audio or upload it on the fly. For example, a laptop theft last month had me jumping from loaner machines to public PCs until I secured a suitable replacement. Web-based and low-profile apps prove their worth in such situations and I want to list a few of my favorite finds here.
Audacity is the old steady when you don’t have GarageBand and you need a free audio editor. It has the backing of an enthusiastic open-source community, which keeps it regularly updated. It’s also popular with the public radio crowd as its simplicity is great for editing interviews (as opposed to remixing music). However, you must download and install it as well as download the LAME codec for the ability to export to mp3 format. This is a simple process, but a significant barrier if your current machine doesn’t offer you install privileges.
That’s where Myna comes in. Part of the Aviary suite, Myna is a fully web-based audio editing tool. The features are robust and include nice editing touches like fades, control points and effects. Aviary as whole offers a community for sharing creations publicly and connecting with friends on the site. This video gives an excellent overview:
Indaba Music also offers an online audio editor, but the site’s strength is its fixation on community. The vision is to enable musicians to collaborate on music from afar. In this Colbert interview, Indaba’s co-founder shares an example of producing music with a friend and then bringing in vocals from a singer in Nigeria. The same scenario could easily be applied to journalism.
Indaba allows the user to create a Session and invite other users. Session members can then upload audio tracks to that session (adding audio via phone call is another interesting feature). When the user opens the web-based audio editor, all the tracks from that session are automatically added to the track list. Session members then see file and editing updates on their dashboard or they can subscribe to session updates via RSS. This has a lot of potential for journalists working remotely on a radio or podcasting project. Of note, is the 100mb limit for free accounts. This may not go far when dealing with long interviews. An upgrade to a 500mb account is $50/year, while unlimited storage is $250/year. Another note, the editor is java-based and in Chrome and on Mac, one must open the session file manually in Java.
Finally, I want to offer mp3cut as the ultra-simple tool for crude audio chopping in a hurry. It’s advertised as a platform for cutting clips from songs for ringtones, but could easily be used to reduce the file size of large interview when one only has one clip to worry about and only wants a small part of that clip.
If you have other free and easily-accessed audio tools, please share them in the comments.
Today, I get a full five minutes to share at RemakeCamp about lessons I’ve learned from working on Mediactive.com. I plan on talking about principles for selecting good tools for citizen journalists. People at this thing are way smarter than me, so I’ll probably learn more than I share. In other news, I’ve started a [...]
I’ll be posting from the Game Developers Conference this week. Things are just kicking off today. Things on my radar: Serious Games Summit as it overlaps well with newsPlay and democratized media topics. Soren Johnson keynote as the discussion of meaning emerging from rules rather than theme is an important topic for anyone interested in [...]
Lately, I’ve been turning my ears to Another Castle, a series of interviews with exceptional games thinkers. The interview with Heather Chaplin in particular makes an amazing clarification that resolves one of my questions about the relationship of videogames to journalism. Chaplin’s comments target a common mistake people make when examining James Gee’s suggestions about [...]
If you’re coming to game development with a journalist background, chances are you’re looking for other skilled individuals who can supplement your programming and art skills (or lack thereof). This puts one in the dangerous place of being the “idea guy.” Purely “idea guys/gals” scare off the digitally talented for obvious reasons. They show up [...]
I want to share three games that affected me in good ways when I played them. I’m not yet sure exactly why. Each is simple and can be played in a short sitting. All have unique gameplay and barely breach the threshold for “game.” It may be that they each deal with relationships in their [...]
Following yesterday’s Knight News Challenge post, I wanted to feature this useful interview with Knight’s Gary Kebbel by the Nieman Lab. The main thought is that some applicants try too hard to recreate ideas they’ve seen win in previous years when Knight is looking to support new and different things (usually). If you’re interested in [...]
Just sat through a conversation with Cronkite folks and David Cohn of Spot.us. His site was a winner of the Knight News Challenge and the majority of the conversation centered around questions from people applying for this year’s grant. As the Challenge application is due October 15th, Dave’s thoughts are timely. Let me paraphrase what [...]
Years ago, my friend Tim came into my room while I was playing the beta test for Horizons while listening to episodes of This American Life. “You’re your own demographic, Josh,” sighed Tim. While that’s particular combination was probably a bit obscure, but it’s heartening to find another game lover with an appreciation for new [...]
Sony has jumped into the free-to-play MMO model with their new game Free Realms. I was expecting something a bit more kiddish when I first saw the style and game activities, but I find the gameplay friendly to a larger age range. The game is quite polished at the moment and downloads content for the [...]
BBC News has a nice article up about the growing micropayment industry surrounding games. Maggie Shiels focuses more on the development in the mobile phone sector, which is definitely a place news should give as much attention to as it does the Web. The biggest thought in the piece is whether North America will jump [...]
I'm a graduate of the Masters program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. I studied Communication, Intercultural Studies and Science previous to this. My professional history encompasses writing, technology, academia, the creative and the analytical.
Specialties: CRMs, CMSs and whatever techie tools I need to accomplish the task at hand.
I'm currently writing and editing for several projects. My main interest is developing quality content for young startups, bringing best practices over from the realm of journalism. While the rest of 2012 is contracted, I'm in the process of scheduling for early 2013.
At CruiseWise, I created and launched company’s customer service department. This inolved developing company onboarding documents and training a team of four agents that closed $600,000 worth of bookings over six months, which was exciting as the product was new territory for all of us. On the technical side, defined requirements for and selected the company CRM. We chose Salesforce and I modified it extensively for the company's data gathering needs.
As well, I was a key contributor to our initial content development. For this, I wrote and edited content for thousands of ship facilities and port entries. This turned out to be a thoroughly journalistic endeavor as much of the information we collected required sourcing and confirmation beyond what was available online.
Social Games Today covers the world of social media gaming for the player audience. I'm the editor and chief content developer on the site.
Mediactive is a project to raise the bar on the demand side of journalism by developing a user's guide to democratized media. I've helped develop the site in Wordpress and establish a digital home for the Mediactive book. I write about and catalog digital tools for everyday publishing. I'm also collaborating on the development of Mediactive teacher resources.
My job at Media Critic involves investigating sources of good media criticism and developing a rather thorough survey of what the Web is saying about the news and journalism. From here, the job involves coaxing Drupal to aggregate and share what's found.
More information about Media Critic here: http://dangillmor.com/2008/12/26/principles-of-a-new-media-literacy/
I served as a Research Assistant for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. There, I project managed the development of the Center's website, StartupMedia.org.
During my time at Arizona State, I've also served as a Teaching Assistant for the following classes:
-International Mass Communication
-Mass Communication Law
-Grammar for Journalists
The New Media Innovation Lab brings together students from Journalism, Business, and Engineering to brainstorm and create new media projects for the lab's clients.
While at UAT I wrote documentation for the University's application for NCA accreditation. This involved collaborating with staff at all levels to document the University's academic processes and supporting departments.
I also helped write documents to accredit the University's Network Security program with the National Security Agency. This application resulted in UAT being recognized as Arizona's first NSA Center of Academic Excellence.
At Southeast Asian Marketing, I worked on a web project to automate how conference attendees signed up and selected hotel rooms during conferences. My role was to communicate project needs in Thailand to designers in the United States. I also updated the company's marketing documents, including brochures for tourism packages that were then distributed to conference attendees. As well, I wrote a newsletter directed toward non-profit donors in the US that described a microloan NGO supported by the company.