The previous three election cycles, blogs, Web video and social media emerged as mainstream tools for covering and influencing the political process. This time around, it's the mobile Web and location-based services that are making inroads. If you've only just caught up with the first three, don't panic. With these free, easy-to-implement resources, virtually anyone can have a place in this newest space.

Google Election Center

Google Election Center offers an embed code for a customizable map widget your readers can use to find their local polling place, ballot information and contact details for election offices. If information for your area is incomplete, you may add to Google's database. (Mobile publishers can point their audiences to this version of the map.)

Foursquare I Voted data visualization

Foursquare is also offering an embeddable map. Available starting election day morning, it will aggregate real-time check-in data for more than 100,000 polling locations.

Twitter Fast Follow

If, on election day or any other busy news day, you ever need to create a text alert service on the fly, Twitter Fast Follow is a way to do it. In fact, every Twitter account already doubles as a text alert system. All you have to do is promote the fact that anyone with a mobile phone — whether they're on Twitter or not — can receive your tweets via SMS by texting “follow NameOfYourTwitterAccount” to 40404.

Until now.

Last week during game 6 of the ALCS on TBS, I caught the tail end of a segment extolling the Texas Rangers' smallball prowess. The announcers were carrying on about a list of 17 run production virtues (which I can't find online for the life of me) the team posts in its dugout. You know, the little things — moving runners over, taking the extra base — that, when strung together, can lead to big things.

That got me thinking: What would a smallball list for interactive news look like? What are small, fundamental things that virtually anyone can do that, if embraced widely and consistently, can make your news team a digital winner?

The meandering list below — containing 17 best practices, like the Rangers' — probably isn't refined enough to post in your dugout, or, er, cubicle. But it should get you thinking. The best part is these are specific tasks (except for, well, the first two) that almost anyone can do, not just multimedia vets or Web development power hitters.

But first…

Two overarching rules

These are kind of like "There's no crying in baseball."

1. Let the story determine the platform, not vice versa.

2. The process is becoming the product. The less you fight this and the more ways you find to work with it, the easier life will be.

Now, on to the nittier, grittier suggestions, organized by subject area.

News gathering

3. Make a note of PDFs and other electronic documents — or even websites or online videos — consulted for a story; users might like to consult them, too.
 
4. Encourage every smart phone owner in your newsroom to install basic live publishing apps like Qik and Ustream for video and Plixi and Instagram for pictures. If they find news or news finds them, these might come in handy, even if it's just to share information with colleagues.

SEO

5. Include alt text, description meta tags, keyword-rich titles.

6. Link to related content. (Good for context, too.)

7. Retain the same story URL for the duration of a breaking news story, writing through it, or, probably better, updating it in a serial, blog-like fashion. (Also good for context.)

Mobile

8. Include thumbnails with lead stories.
 
9. On social media, link to mobile-friendly versions of breaking news stories.

10. When applicable, append mobile articles with addresses of places mentioned in or related to the story. Most mobile browsers automatically pull up a map when users tap locational text.

Social Media

11. Respond to social media mentions.

12. On Facebook, post articles with photos; on Twitter, RT, @ reply/mention, use hashtags; on Foursquare, leave tips.

13. Include reporters' Twitter handles at the end of their articles.

14. Reserve your brand name on the "next" platform/service/network, even if you don't plan to use it now.

UGC

15. When soliciting content, link to previous contributions users can emulate. This also shows people their stuff isn't going into some cyberspace black hole.

16. If a submission is exemplary, or just every now and then, personally thank your contributors.

17. Pretend you're a user and you see news breaking. Pretend you have a photo/video/tip and want to share it. Pretend you don't know how. How many clicks/taps on your Web/mobile site until you do know? If you're unhappy with your answer, make this information easier to find.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Nero.Lives
Modified Creative Commons photo by Flickr user erik jaeger

Journalists and content creators have a lot to do.

Excuse us while we track down sources, mine Twitter and blogs for story ideas and attend editorial meetings and brainstorming sessions. Oh, and of course, I’m forgetting the distractions that pop up and the fires we have to extinguish every day. That being said, how do we keep track of the important tasks that need to get done, especially in a new media world where the responsibilities continue to stack up?

For me, it use to be an enormous amount of sticky notes, pasted around my computer screen. Thanks to technology – that’s changed.

Google Calendar: Steve and I have started using this tool for the very blog you’re reading now. It reminded me to write this post, but I wouldn’t have forgotten. Swear.

Benefits: Accessible from anywhere, sharable, able to be synced to many devices, email reminders.

Remember the Milk: I wrote a quick post on this tool on my personal blog. It’s another free service that allows you to create and categorize to-do lists in various ways. The crew at Remember the Milk has a premium version that gives you access to mobile apps for the iPhone and Android, support, plus other features.

Benefits: Fun-to-use interface, smart lists, unlimited lists and email reminders.

Why time management is crucial for content creation

1. If you’re not wasting time on the small stuff, you can concentrate on the big stuff.
2. You’ll have more time to write, photograph, code websites and create cool stuff.
3. You won’t forget things and tick off co-workers, sources and other people you rely on for help in creating your content.
4. The most important part of creating engaging, sticky content just might be planning. And with these tools, you’ll be on your way.

This is what has worked for me. What do you use to manage your to-do lists or projects?

A confluence of trends is making online video more important, and, in many respects, easier to do…

Candidates "broadcasting themselves" — and their opponnents — by now seems like old hat. And it is. This fall, Web video is part of virtually every big campaign's toolbelt. With political spots spreading across the net like stink bugs, it's easy to forget that this is just the second midterm of the YouTube era.

That's right, four years ago online video as we know it — fueled by Flash compression and broadband adoption — was just beginning to hit its stride. If Web video was only getting going then, there's no telling what it will look four years from now. The five trends outlined below, however, offer some clues:

Internet TV

It looks like the gamechanger that is the marriage of the Web and television sets might finally be upon us. The new Google TV, a revamped Apple TV, their competitors and next-generation video game consoles promise to finally deliver true Internet TV, possibly as soon as this fall. Consider this your save the date.

Mobile video

Web video on family room bigscreens promises to be, um, big, but so does video on the smallscreens in our pockets and purses. Mobile video is "exploding," and should grow even faster as more 4G networks come online, ReadWriteWeb reports. Meanwhile, tablets, another technology that appears to be finally living up to its hype, are creating a brand new market for longer-form, higher production value Web video.

Social video

Even the least social media savvy among us probably knows the term "viral video." Yes, as Rick Astley, Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson and Antoine Dodson know all too well, videos are the most spreadable of spreadable media. Videos also promote the stickiness, or prolonged engagement, advertisers covet. All of this makes video likely to be a big part of any social network's growth strategy, as we're seeing with the #NewTwitter. Twitter's biggest update since its 2006 launch allows users to view video and other media embedded in tweets without leaving the service.

Broadband expansion

One out of every three American adults does not have high-speed Internet in his or her home. Watching video, tedious on dial-up, is impossible, obviously, for the 80 million Americans with no home Internet access of any kind. The federal government and corporate projects like Google Fiber are making earnest efforts to bring highspeed into more households. This, in addition to providing residents with a service some countries have deemed a human right, will increase demand for Web video.

Production and distribution advances

As demand for online video increases, it's, fortunately, becoming easier to fulfill thanks to technological advances in video acquisition, editing and distribution.

Bursting onto the market three years ago, super portable, super easy to use Flip video cameras turn anyone holding one into a potential videojournalist. By offering similar functionality plus live-streaming ability on a device users are already carrying around, video camera-equipped smart phones could displace Flips and similar cameras as quickly as they arrived, some predict.

The rise of cloud computing, meanwhile, both simplifies storage of this data-heavy medium and creates exciting collaboration opportunities, as video editing community Stroome demonstrates.

Finally, HTML5, in addition to enabling some real nifty interactivity, eliminates the need for video plugins, making life easier for developers and providing users a consistent experience across platforms.

…Yet, few news orgs excel at it

60 Minutes

The New York Times

The Roanoke Times

The Shelby Star

This is the second post in our weekly “Friday” series on news applications of social media tools. Yes, we know today’s Sunday. Wanna fight about it? Thanks to Scribd communications director Michelle Laird for helping us find examples and for explaining some of Scribd’s features.

The next time you have a print document you want to share with your audience, you might want to consider sharing it with Scribd. Not only does the YouTube for documents present content elegantly and load it quickly, its social functions connect it and your brand to millions of potential readers, including mobile users.

The free cloud-based service, which offers monetization opportunities for publishers, processes PDF, text, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other file types into its special iPaper format, posts the converted documents on its searchable, Facebook- and Twitter-integrated, community-minded website and makes them embeddable on virtually any third-party space.

Here’s an example from one of Scribd’s most prodigious news org users, USA Today:

Yep, that’s the First Family’s tax return. How much did the president make from his two books? What charities did the Obamas donate to? Answers to these questions are just some of the financial details disclosed within the return’s 65 pages.

We’ll forgive you if you take a pause from our post and scroll through it a bit. We know users are fascinated by raw content. Maybe you’ve experienced this phenomenon with raw photos or video you’ve published. Well, it applies to documents as well. Police reports, court documents (last month’s order in the California gay marriage case went viral) and personal correspondences can be just as spreadable, and Scribd’s an excellent tool for spreading them.

Buttons within the viewer above (historically Flash-based, Scribd’s default view now uses HTML5) streamline reposting (via social networks or another embed) and downloading (as a PDF or text file).

For more than files and forms

Although probably the most popular use, primary documents — government and think tank reports, architectural renderings and political fliers are other examples — are far from the only type of content news organizations are sharing on Scribd. Here’s a look at some other ways outlets are using it:

• Newspaper and magazine layouts
   

  Although other tools in Scribd’s sphere like Issuu might be better for showcasing entire editions, Scribd is well suited for showing off a dynamic cover or front page or other high-impact layouts, like this Forbes spread on caddying for Jack Nicklaus.

• Historical articles
   

  As part of its coverage of this summer’s oppressive heat, The Dallas Morning News shared a print article chronicling a similar stretch of scorching weather 30 years ago.

• Detailed maps and visualizations
   

  The State newspaper offers University of South Carolina football fans this printable guide to gameday traffic.

• Interactive cutouts

  The Stanley Cup’s annual adventures with the champion hockey players who ferry it across the globe is a well-documented tradition. The paper of record in the hometown of last season’s NHL playoff winner invited its readers to join in the fun by printing out a 2D version of the legendary trophy and posing with it during their own travels.

Any other cool uses of Scribd you’ve seen out there? Any new ways you think news organizations could be using it? We’d love to hear about it.

Scribd Branded Reader

We’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight Scribd’s Branded Reader (used in each of the examples above), which is specifically targeted at media companies. News organizations and other outlets can now automatically apply to have documents they upload displayed in special viewer branded with their logo.

This encourages users to patronize the organizations that posted the document and ensures they get credit for posting it as it spreads across the Web. Right now branded readers are reserved for larger media companies.

In today’s Web world, most of us journalists and content creators want what we produce to be shared. A share is one of the Web’s highest compliments, right next to a link. So how does this happen?

Well, it’s not easy to create sharable content. Why? It’s not an exact science. What strikes your audience as sharable one day might not work on the next. Frustrating? Maybe, but we encourage you to take that as a challenge.

On Labor Day, Steve and I collaborated on a post called “The changing face of journalism jobs.” To date, according to BackType, it’s our most shared post. We were thrilled at its success. Heck, if this were our post on news games, we’d be wearing newspaper sailor hats. But let’s not dwell on that missed opportunity for our audience... Instead, let’s focus on what Steve and I learned in creating that jobs post, why we think it was shared, and continues to be shared so much.

1. Be relevant. The post focused on jobs and was created on Labor Day. So the nature of what people do for a living was on the forefront of our readers' minds. The journalism industry itself is in an massive evolution, so journalists new and old want to know where they fit in. This post does that in a way. Plus, as Anna Tarkov pointed out, it may have been shared to cheer up a lot of out-of-work journalists.

2. Be able to change plans quickly. Steve and I had planned a different post for that day, but we ditched it when Steve realized a post about journalism jobs would be a better fit. He was right, and I’m glad we started from scratch on the jobs post.

3. Make it unique. Good, sharable content is core content, or the kind of content that is difficult for others to reproduce. Our own employment searches informed a lot of the post; we’ve seen the evolution of the journalism job market first hand.

4. Make sure your content can spark conversation. We made sure we included a lot of links in our post to give it more weight. We also included snippets of job ads. We wrote witty sub-heads and tried, as always, to create scannable, easy-to-read content. We were lucky Steve Buttry stopped by and added some links to related posts he had written in the comments. This really added value to what we wrote. All this contributes to content that can invite conversations and sharing.

5. Participate and Analyze. When we wrote that post, we really had no idea it would be so popular, but we’re glad people have found it valuable. We’ve made sure to thank the many of you who shared it. I would have thought our post about news site designs would have received more links and retweets than it did, but sometimes you can’t predict what readers will go for. You can only analyze, participate in conversations with them about what they want and react to those wants and needs. We’re always analyzing why things work the way they do (like this post!).

What can we add to this list? What makes content sharable?

Remember when blogs opened up Web publishing to virtually anyone? Not that there hasn't been collateral damage (I'd rant about it, but that would be hypocritical), but, on balance this of course has been a very good thing. 

Well, a similar thing is happening now. Free, accessible tools are greatly expanding the population of potential developers for emerging platforms like mobile, augmented reality, tablets and location-based services.

It's a win for the companies behind the platforms, because it grows the content offerings on their network (though, like with blogs, there are quality trade-offs). And it's a win for news organizations and other resource-limited publishers because it lets them reach these networks without over-extending their employees or budgets.

Over the summer I bookmarked four such tools I thought would be of interest to journalists. I'm planning to give some of them a try and to share how things go. If you're familiar with these tools, or know of similar resources, tell us about it in the comments.

• App Inventor

  If you can drag and drop, you can make an Android app with Google's App Inventor. App Inventor developers can access devices' GPS, motion sensors and third-party Web services like Twitter just like professional developers. Google's accepting invitation requests and is slowly but surely e-mailing out invites. (I applied in July and am still waiting on mine.)

•  Augmentation

  Layar partner Hoppala's cloud-based GUI/CMS lets non-coders create augmented reality content. How might news organizations use augmented reality? Superimposing planned developments over their proposed sites, publishing interactive festival-guides, pinpointing the locations of crime incidents — the possibilities are endless. Augmentation is ready to use now. Simply apply for a Layar developer key, then, once you receive that, register with Hoppala and follow the instructions that start at the 2:00 mark of this screencast.

• Crowdmap

  The Ushahidi open source map wiki, which aggregates text messages and online postings and displays them on an interactive map, can now be deployed by non-techies via cloud-based Crowdmap. Perhaps best known as a tool for relief workers in disaster zones, Ushahidi has been used by journalists to monitor conflicts, snow removal and public transportation problems.

• MagCloud iPad app

  OK, this last one isn't as robust as the other three. But, for magazine publishers interested in replicating their print product on the iPad, MagCloud's app gives them a way to do it without any real effort of their own. All publishers have to do is opt in and users can download an iPad-optimized version of their product in a single click. Yes, ideally iPad content is interactive and multimedia — multimedia at least could be on its way to MagCloud — but for those without the time or expertise to optimize their offerings for this popular platform this is a nice, simple solution.

Image by jomirano.

Some might say that much of the magic that happens when creating news content happens in editorial meetings. Reporters, editors and other staffers toss around ideas for stories, features and more.

Traditionally, that brainstorming process has been closed off to readers and users of news content. However, as journalism professor Jay Rosen pointed out in a recent presentation, the communications power structure has shifted and people have become a bigger part of the process. They are not just consumers, but users and creators. With a social bookmarking tool, like Diigo or Delicious, newsroom staff can help add context to stories and bring readers into the news gathering and planning process.

This post will be the first in a regular Friday series on how to use different social media tools and integrate them into the newsroom. Today, I’ll focus on Diigo, a social bookmarking site that I recently started using. The possibilities for Diigo are many, and I won't be covering all of them, so if you have more, add them to the comments.

How does Diigo work?

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Diigo functions like Delicious except with a few twists. The video above will explain this quicker than I can. Give it a watch before you read on. In short, Diigo enables you to not only bookmark websites and URLs, but also annotate them, save them as full HTML pages (in case they ever go away) and form groups centered around topics.

How can journalists use it?

1. Bookmark stories. These can either be stories your news org produces that center around a specific topic area or stories that other news orgs and people produce that add more context to your coverage.
2. Save and archive primary documents. This way, readers and website users can always access Web pages or other information that may be yanked down for various reasons.
3. Create sticky notes for your stories to spark further conversation. The interactive sticky note feature of Diigo could be a nice way to highlight the holes in a story. Of course, audience members would need to have a Diigo account to see these public sticky notes. Sticky notes can also be used among newsroom staff, so your audience sees a live conversation about the story involving the staff that produced it.
4. Create a knowledge repository around topics and news events. Diigo makes it easy to collaborate as a group. What if you used this tool to collaborate among reporters and editors, or set up a special group for your most engaged readers and users? The possibilities for more context-driven news exist, thanks to bringing the knowledge of many together.

These are just for starters. What other ways can journalists use Diigo and other social bookmarking tools?

Collaboration among reporters, photographers, editors and producers has always been an important part of news gathering. Stories are discovered and improved when journalists work together. Interactive tools can make this collaboration easier, faster and richer, just like they do for conversation between journalists and their audience. Yet, internal applications of interactive technology seem to get less attention. They’re certainly talked about less, and, in the news organizations I’ve worked for at least, they were utilized less as well.

That’s changing at one of my former employers. The Journal Register Company, which made industry headlines recently for its ambitious Ben Franklin Project, in which it produced 18 newspapers and websites using almost exclusively free online tools, last month launched an in-house innovation incubator it calls the ideaLab.

Fifteen employees from various publications and departments are each receiving a smart phone, iPad and netbook; 10 hours of their work week to play with them; and a $500 monthly stipend to reimburse them for the personal time they’ll inevitably spend testing the tools. The just-as-cool-part is they’re trading notes on blogs and social media for all 15 ideaLab members, their non-ideaLab colleagues and anyone else on the Web to see, enabling all parties to feed off each other’s ideas. An ideaLab indeed.

The more journalists can open up their work to the outside world the better. They routinely demand transparency from others. It behooves them to practice what they preach, especially when modern technology makes it so easy. To me, though, one of the most exciting parts of the ideaLab is the extent that it makes good on two over-promised, under-delivered business platitudes:

• Companies say their employees are their most valuable resources, yet, when faced with a challenge, especially of the technological variety, they often turn to outside consultants. The ideaLab empowers employees to solve their own problems by giving them the respect and resources they deserve.

• Companies say their various departments and offices comprise a single corporate family, yet employees on separate floors, let alone separate buildings, can "work together" for years without learning each other’s names. With the ideaLab, reporters, editors, salespersons, marketers and managers from New England, the Midwest and Upstate New York are pursuing solutions together rather than in isolation.

While not every news organization can afford to buy gadgets for 15 of its employees, every company can afford the tools JRC employees are using to share their discoveries. They're free.

Here are some other ways news companies can put interactive technology to work internally:

• Maintain an in-house blog with tutorials on new media hardware, software and techniques.

• Talk shop — and, yes, even gripe — on private social networks like Yammer.

• Move lists of story ideas from text files on individual hard drives to shared Google Docs documents or spreadsheets.

• Develop a “virtual newsroom” smart phone app. It might include: Contact information for key colleagues and sources, one-touch submission of photos and video, addresses of common destinations, breaking news checklists, electronic release forms, links to open government laws, a dynamic map showing the location of co-workers out in the field.

• Publish in-house editorial and social media style guides as moderated wikis.

• Upload everyone's interview notes into a secure internal database.

• Crowdsource headline writing via a custom desktop widget.

What would you add to this list? How is your organization using interactive media internally?

Image by abejo.

You’re a journalist — maybe a reporter creating stories, or a Web producer responsible for creating engaging content. What’s one of the many factors you have to consider in doing your job?

Page views. You need to drive traffic to your site. That aids in advertising revenue, attracts an audience and impacts your news brand. A debate has surfaced recently on the effects of page view journalism on the profession. In May, Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher wrote a post centered around how journalists won’t report news unless it can drive page views. A recent article by the The New York Times on burnout in online news seemed to confirm that notion in a sense. Foremski wrote another post reacting to the Times story, saying:

The medium is not the message. In today's media: page views is the message.

That sounds dangerous, but analytics do seem to be playing a larger and larger role. The real question is how do journalists harness page view journalism for the better? How do they steer visitors to the important stories?

It would be easy if journalists could crank out Internet memes (see some memes above) for campaign coverage, the war in Afghanistan or net neutrality. The State Journal-Register in Illinois saw some success with its Rod Blagojevich ringtones. While crafting the perfect traffic-driving piece of content isn’t an exact science, there are certain principles you take away from the good, old-fashioned meme.

BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti, a former Huffington Post staffer, put together a presentation on creating viral content. It’s an interesting read, and is embedded below (thanks to Peter Kafka at MediaMemo for spotting it).

In it Peretti sums up his strategy to go viral:

Viral Media — activate the bored at work network
Mullet Strategy — business upfront, party in the back!
Big Seed Marketing — pay for the seed, optimize for viral lift
Maniacs — target crazy people, not couch potatoes
Mormonism — quality is not enough, build evangelism into your ideas

Jonah Peretti Viral Meetup Talk

So where does that leave journalists wanting to create content that people will read, understand and share?

1. Make your content short, and easy to understand. Journalistic giant 60 Minutes has used this strategy with its online video, according to Michael Radutzky, a senior producer for the show. This approach has also worked for MTV, as Steve has pointed out in research, saying:

Catering to users' preference for chunked content, as the snippet storytelling that's emerged on the Web is often called, dramatically increased traffic on MTV News' Web site (Shields, 2009). Shortening stories, breaking apart longer videos and publishing "fascinating nuggets" from longer stories as individual pieces preceded a more than 1 million year-over-year increase in unique video streams, a MTV executive told trade magazine Mediaweek.

2. Try to give the reader/user a warning of the time investment involved (this is why lists are so popular on the Web).
3. Try to entertain as much as educate. Those “crazy people” Peretti talks about want to be entertained.
4. Don’t be afraid to fail. The vast majority of content will never go viral.
5. Page views may be the online metric of the day, but remember, most Internet memes fade from people’s memories quickly. How can you create something that will last? How can you garner significant page views while your content passes certain tests of quality and educates people at the same time?

There's no sure-fire answer to those questions, but you can head in at least one direction, and expect to find some favorable results. Steve has pointed out that active news consumers let others be passive, so you don't necessarily need to activate everyone, just the ones who want to be engaged. According to a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on understanding the participatory news consumer, "37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter." Bingo – that's the segment of your audience that wants to be engaged, and might turn your news content into memorable content.

Why?

They work for you in a way. They create content, and serve as evangelists for your own content. You don't need analytics or Internet memes to know that having more people on your team is a good thing.