Friday Fast Five – Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. 435digital – SEO Tools for Beginners

2. Poynter – How journalists can develop mobile video skills 

3. Poynter – How news can compete with cat videos: 6 lessons for multimedia journalists

4. ProBlogger – 11 Ways to Prepare for Your Blog Theme Upgrade

5. PR Daily – 30 ways to promote your next blog post

Editor’s note: the Digital Journalism Task Force is working on programming that will take us right to the annual convention. To that end, we’d appreciate it if you could take this quick 5-question survey to let us know what you want. Thanks!!

Friday Fast Five – Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. Mashable – 6 Ways to Spring Clean You LinkedIn Profile

2. Media Bistro – Best Free Interview Transcription Tools

3. Inc. – 5 Reasons to Blow Uo Your Current Website

4. Mashable - 49 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

5. PR Daily – 30 ways to promote your next blog post

Friday Fast Five – Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. Covering Health – Simple Tools For Spicing Up Your Stories With Multimedia

2. PR Daily – 22 image-editing tools to make your pictures pop

3. Mashable – 40+ Digital Resources That You May Have Missed

4. Bill Moyers - Five Great Online Tools for Mining Public Records

5. Kikolani - How To Write A Killer Headline and Make Your Post Shine

Friday Fast Five: Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. SHIFT Digital – The Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Cheat Sheet

2. iMedia Connection – 6 Trends That Will Shape Digital in 2013

3. PBS MediaShift – Meograph: The Future of Storytelling is 4D (with context)

4. PR Daily – 20 Content Ideas Readers Love

5. Mashable – 40 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

Friday Fast Five: Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. SlideShare – How to Share Your Digital Stories

2. Dukeo – 30 Ways to Make Blogging Easier

3. iMedia Connection – 10 Ways to Promote Your Brand on LinkedIn

4. QKPix – 7 Essential Items For Your Camera Bag

5. Gizmodo - 10 Photoshop Alternatives That Are Totally Free

Friday Fast Five: Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

1. All Things D – Top Five Social Media Predictions for 2013

2. Open Forum – 4 Socialcam Tricks for Your Small Business

3. Gizmodo – How to Get the Most Out of Google Chrome

4. Mediabistro – 5 iPad Apps Journalists Should Try For Interviews

5. PBS MediaShift – 15 Must-Haves Collaboration Tools for Journalists

Friday Fast Five – Your Guide To New Media

By Ameena Rasheed, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force intern

Editor’s note: Join NABJ DJTF Secretary Kiratiana Freelon for a TweetChat — 10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Digital Skills in 2013 — on Tuesday, Jan. 15 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.  She will offer up 10 ideas, including resource links.  Participants are also free to offer up their own resources.  The hashtag is #DJTFChat.  We will create a Storify of the event for those who can’t make it live.

1. Inbound Marketing – 25 Social Media Tips for Twitter in 2013

2. SocialBrite – Storytelling tips from the experts at Pixar

3. Blogging Tips – 6 Social Media Tools To Look Forward To In 2013

4. American Society of Journalists and Authors – Legal Danger for Bloggers: Two Misconceptions,  Three Resources, One Suggestion

5. Mashable – 5 Better Ways to Network on Twitter and LinkedIn

Friday Fast Five + Five – Great Blog Posts From #ONA12

By Benét J. Wilson, chair, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force & social media/newsletters editor, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association

I really meant to do more blog posts from last week’s great Online News Association convention, but life has just gotten in the way. So I’m going to kill two birds with one stone — passing along other great posts from ONA and using my usual Friday Fast Five post to do it. Enjoy!

1. Craig Kannely of Huffington Post was one of the speakers at our great unofficial session at Facebook headquarters.  He also did a great blog post breaking down all the tweets from ONA.  My girl (and NABJ member) @Marissaaevans made the list of top 30 tweeters!!
2. For those of us who had to decide between attending ONA in San Francisco (me) or Excellence in Journalism in Ft Lauderdale (not me), this Storify from freelance journalist Brian Ballenger offers a nice summary of both — and a promise that they won’t schedule these conferences at the same time again!
3. I like the approach that Nieman Journalism Lab took with its post — print Tweeting the conference.  An old school method that appeals to my heart – pen and paper!!
4. Jeff Sonderman of the Poynter Institute offered 12 bite-sized takeaways from ONA, including “Advertising is a cruel game,” NPR’s Matt Thompson said in a business-model presentation.
5. The WordCount blog offers the top 20 online news highlights from #ONA12. I love the @dan_carino cartoon of Twitter’s (and NABJ’s) Mark Luckie encouraging us to “tweet our beat.”
6. Steve Buttry (who I finally got to meet), Digital Transformation Editor for Digital First Media, used Storify to admit that “social media is a time suck, like lots of useful journalism tools.”
7. The Gannett Tumblr has this great post on the best technology tools for journalists.
8. Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa was kind enough to use Google Drive to share all his notes from the convention, ranging from the password for the convention’s free wifi to keynote speaker Jose Antonio Vargas.
9. Mandy Jenkins of Digital First Media (and a fellow ONA board candidate) used her great Zombie Journalism blog to lay out her ONA board platform. I especially enjoyed this post on shaping the next generation of online journalists.
10. Finally, the Journalism.co.uk blog offered up its ten lessons for digital journalists from #ONA12.

5 Reasons Why I Donated To Homicide Watch’s Kickstarter Campaign — And Why You Should Too

By Benét J. Wilson, chair, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force & social media/newsletters editor, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association

I lived in Washington, D.C. on and off for nearly 25 years, and I remember back in the day when the nation’s capital was the murder capital of the United States.  And even though I live in Baltimore, I still like to keep up with the goings-on in my adopted hometown.

One of the ways I do this was by following the Homicide Watch blog, whose tag line is “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.  The blog, the brainchild of Laura and Chris Amico, documents every murder  — from crime to conviction — in the city using an amazing mix of journalism, data, maps and social media. The blog has gained the respect of D.C. residents, long used to having their stories ignored.  It has also earned the respect of journalists and journalism organizations for its efforts.

Founder Laura Amico has won a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, and a deal to keep the blog going fell through. So now she’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $40,000 to keep the blog running for a year by turning it into a student lab project.

The campaign ends on Thursday, Sept. 13 at 6:26 p.m.  if it doesn’t reach its goal of $40,000, the blog will end.  So here’s why I donated $25 to this campaign — and why you should too.

1. The project appeals to my sense of diversity in media coverage by telling the stories of people who almost never show up in the city’s traditional media outlets.
2. The blog relies on social media to find and confirm stories that others are missing.
3. It is putting a human face on the devastation that murder causes. These victims are no longer faceless numbers.
4. The Amicos are blazing a trail for those who want to put their own twist on the craft of journalism.
5. With media companies firmly focused on the bottom line, we need to support compelling storytellers who aren’t focused on profits alone.

If I haven’t convinced you, read this Homicide Watch blog post and this blog post by Steve Buttry outlining the supporters of the Kickstarter campaign.  Finally if this still doesn’t convince you, pick a few cases on the blog and read the comments from the victims’ families.  Please donate.

Friday Fast Five

By Benét J. Wilson, chair, NABJ Digital Journalism Task Force & social media/newsletters editor, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association

1. Mashable — 11 Fascinating Facts About Google Maps
2. GigaOm — Learnist – a ‘Pinterest for Education’ – releases apps for iPhone, iPad
3. Sue Gardner’s blog — How to write a Wikipedia article (it’s easy)
4. Blogging Tips — 30 Ways to Increase Site Traffic
5. Journalists’ Tool Kit — Good Tutorial Sites For HTML, HTML5, CSS, jQuery