So as the school year has come to an end I’ve had several requests form graduating seniors for advice on what gear they should purchase to add to their arsenal  to get them ready for the next step of their career. A long time ago I set up a gear guide to help people with this, but it’d been a while since I’d updated it, until this weekend. So take a gander if you’re curious, looking for some interesting summer reading or in the market for new multimedia, mobile gear or books, check it out.

I also added a couple more categories to better split out the topics into more clear buckets: Design, development, mobile/tablet tools, management & leadership, social media & community, video/audio/photo gear and video/audio/photo training. … Oh, and “Nerdtastic stuff”… my favorite category of quirky nerd tools and gifts.

Full Disclosure: That is an affiliate link, so if you make a purchase I’ll get a 4% kick back, which I’ll use towards hosting costs for the site. It doesn’t cost you any more, just sends a little cash my way for helping create the resource.

Flickr photo courtesy Stéfan Le Dû

The Carnival of Journalism is back and I’m hostin’!

I posed the question to the crew:

What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?

(Yes, we’d all like to swing in our newsroom, lay some boot heels on chests, hoist the black flag and change everything by the end of business on Monday — but the reality is, that ain’t happening unless you have a couple buckets of cash to buy a paper of your choice and a rusty saber.) So what are some realistic, real-world examples of free (or cheap) ways you can help fuel change at your newsroom.

Imagine an enormous, heavy flywheel — a massive disc mounted horizontally on an axle, measuring 30 feet in diameter, two feet in thickness and 5,000 pounds in weight. In order to get the flywheel moving, you must push it. Its progress is slow; your consistent efforts may only move it a few inches at first. Over time, however, it becomes easier to move the flywheel, and it rotates with increasing ease, carried along by its momentum. The breakthrough comes when the wheel’s own heavy weight does the bulk of the work for you, with an almost unstoppable force.

Each of the good-to-great companies experienced the flywheel effect in their transformations. The first efforts in each transformation were almost imperceptible. Yet, over time, with consistent, disciplined actions propelling it forward, each company was able to build on its momentum and make the transformation — a build-up that led to a breakthrough. The momentum they built was then able to sustain their success over time.

The Internet is changing everything in our culture and to ignore the new tools it offers to leverage the vast and wonderfully deep, previously unavailable information to your competitive advantage would be foolish. One of the more fascinating trends I’ve noticed from this year’s presidential election has been the use of data and social media in tracking/predicting news stories.

Savvy reporters that brush up on their analytical, social media and data metrics skills may be able to see which way the wind is blowing before the leaves start to rustle or an official press release is proofed. (Not to get all scifi geek on you but kinda like Neo reading the lines of neon green floating code in The Matrix.)

To do this, reporters could begin tracking and analyzing:

• Wikipedia edits — Watch the change frequency, history and by whom (and what other changes they’ve made).
• Social media marketing — Watch key names/accounts on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Digg and other popular social sites for accounts that social media marketing teams will snatch up and start filling out for public propaganda.
• Google AdWords purchase rates and bidding — Campaigns will buy out the inventory of future candidates to protect their names/repuations
• Related/Obvious URLs –  (I.e. ObamaBiden.com) Watch their owners (and what else they own), purchases, transfers and activity on them
• Google Trends — Follow traffic bursts and growth around key dates
• Track their website changes — See if they’ve changed the wording on their position and bust them Jon Stewart-style (I can’t believe Jon Stewart is the model for holding authorities accountable now). Or do it the cheaper ways. Check out Versionista, too! It’s free and used by many leading blogs! (Thanks, Tim D’Avis)
• Google Alerts — Ahh, the ‘old’ standby. Set up Google alerts for topics that interest you or are relevant to your beat. Keywording properly is critical here though. Michael, in the comments, suggests checking out FaveBot.com too!

None of these are an exact science, they’re just more tools to use but as analytics increasingly get more accurate they could be very useful, if not just plain interesting. They’re also more likely to be accurate or useful than a generic ‘man on the street’ filler quote or vague political party press releases.

If anything, this is more proof that we need more tech-friendly reporters who embrace data and social media and less curmudgeons who fear or ignore it.

Do you have any other ideas on the new reporting tools the Internets have given us? Shout them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

About eight months ago, I did a series of blog posts critiquing some of the paid-membership, professional journalism organizations and of the top four, the Online News Association probably saw the harshest criticism. Since then, ONA has made some changes and I wanted to update some of my points.

(For the record, no one from ONA has acknowledged my blog critique except Amy Webb, who is planning the convention  this year and asked for feedback/advice on the curriculum. But it appears that my words or something else has lit a fire under ONA and they’ve made several notable changes regaurding some of the issues I brought up.)

1 – Convention lineup improved
The conference organizers (Amy Webb, Tiffany Shackelford and I think Chrys Wu and probably 9382389 other people are behind the scenes helping too) may have prepared the best lineup ever at ONA. Many of the panels are high-utility and very applicable to actually getting things done and less about the panelist’s ego than in previous years. The topics also much closer to being cutting edge and more technologically focused than ever before — I never would have thought I’d see something about the Semantic Web at ONA! (Yay!)

I am slightly disappointed by the IRE organized pre-workshop on “Dynamic Websites for Newsrooms” not including DJango (instead only speaking to Ruby on Rails development), especially since I believe more news organizations actually use Django than Ruby… but it’s not a huge deal. The fact that Ruby is getting taught at an ONA conference is excellent.

2 – Board diversity encouraged more precisely

On Feb. 15, almost exactly one month after my post, ONA announced, “Starting this fall, with the election for the 2009 board, associate, academic and student members of the Online News Association now will be eligible to vote and run for ONA’s board of directors. … While we remain primarily focused on the needs of working journalists, we also recognize that the board should better reflect the membership as a whole. So we have modified the bylaws to provide for the election of up to three non-professional members to the board.”

They’ve followed through this summer in their board member nomination process by specifically calling out the precise diversity issues I pointed out (that the board is predominately older executives, largely white males at major publications high up on the totem pole). For nominations this year they specifically asked for:

It is the responsibility of the Nominating Committee to present a slate that reflects a diversity of interests in the make-up of the board. These interests include:

-Types of online medium represented on the board.
-Sizes of institutions represented by the individual member.
-Type of experience in digital media.
-Representation that reflects the diverse communities that journalism serves.

This is fantastic. (Yay!) Now hopefully some young, smart, diverse individuals were nominated (and still working after the bloodiest summers in the history of this profession).

3 – Representing the business better on larger issues
In March, two months after my critique, ONA publicly spoke out (and notified its members) about the tighter Major League Baseball restrictions and to the Dallas Mavericks for their new media policy. (Yay!)

This is fantastic and something I’d like to continue to see more of from ONA. Perhaps even an partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation? ONA has the power to bring major online and information issues to the forefront. Specifically, I’d really like to see them start speaking out and educating members about Net Neutrality and how if it goes away it could disastrously affect both journalism and online freedoms. There is no other journalism organization more perfectly positioned to spearhead this important issue. (Disclosure: Anyone that reads this blog knows I’m a huge proponent of protecting Net Neutrality. If you didn’t, now you do.)

4 – Releasing the conference audio
I’ve been critical about ONA capturing audio of the conferences then selling it back to members for $149 a CD, while many, MANY other conventions offer this stuff for free — even in video form and to the entire public, not just members! It’s a great form of free marketing for your organization!

Since my post, (on April 2, to be exact) ONA has turned over half a new leaf and is at least sharing this content with paid members — they’ve posted notes and audio files from the 2007 conference in the members area of the site! Free to everyone (especially since it’s now a year old) would have been cool but I’ll take this victory. (Yay!)

5- ONA expands its web presense
On July 28th, ONA announced they hired their first Web Editor, Sherry Skalko. (This wasn’t part of my critique but I believe it should have a positive impact on the organization and should be applauded.) Also this summer, Interactive Narratives 2.0 launched, which ONA helped support. (Triple yay!) I’m also intrigued by the grant they were awarded for ‘expanding member services‘ and what that actually means. We’ll see what happens.

It should also be noted that over the past couple months Acting Executive Director, Tom Regan, has also done an absolutely fantastic job covering for Lori Schwab (the former Executive Director who left ONA this summer).

So they definitely made a great deal of progress since my critique but I think also they took one step back recently:

1- Nickelin’ and dimin’.

This next convention is going to be an expensive one. The host hotel costs $259 a night at the ‘discounted’ rate and that’s going to turn away members who aren’t already into the ONA ‘class.’

I’m afraid this is going to continue a trend I noticed at last year’s convention, where there was quite a dearth of the Seth Gitners and the William Couches of the online news business. You know, the smart worker bees that win the awards, innovate regularly and keep readers coming back looking for more interesting online experiences? The ones who make all the ONA members in sport coats look good? They can’t afford to expense it and most papers aren’t helping them out anymore.

The point is, they shouldn’t have to rob two banks to get the money to attend an industry convention. It’s not just ONA either. UNITY had some crazy ‘discounted’ rates for their hotels. But I’m getting off topic now.

Other nicklin’ and dimin’ from ONA:
+ Charging for a job fair at the worst time in the history of journalism
They’re holding a job fair in conjunction with the convention. (Yay!) But charging outsiders (people not registered for the convention) $50 to enter the room, $25 for students. (Boo!) Change people, fine, but keep it under $25 unless you can gaurentee more than 25 employers that will be there and actually hiring. And charging the students? Thumbs down. It should be noted again that if you’ve paid for the convention you get in free — but you still have to register for the job fair. (Really? They can’t print off a list of the registrants and just look at that if they try and sneak into the job fair?) ONA is also charging anyone that’s hiring (all 3? maybe 4? publications) $250 to set up a table. (Boo!)

+ Dinner for $125 — you better be sure you’re taking home some glass
ONA has also announced they’re charging $125 per person to attend the awards banquet if you’re not registered for the conference. ONE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE FREAKING DOLLARS. So if you’ve got a spouse or a proud mom that you want to impress with your shiny piece of ONA glass (assuming that you actually win) that’ll be $250. Are you a polygamist? You might want to get out your Centurion Card.

In retrospect though, I realized $125 may be the standard fee for eating dinner with ONA; I, unfortunately, attended an ONA dinner in Orlando a couple years ago and was surprised by a $125 per person check (which my multimedia producer ass couldn’t expense like some of the ‘other’ ONA fat cats).

But seriously — high fives all around and a little wag of the finger
Please don’t get me wrong. I definitely think ONA is making *VAST* improvements in 2008. But the cost issue concerns me as we are all feeling an immense financial crunch of an industry going through massive change during a recession or economic downturn or whatever we’re calling it now. I worry that new, non-uppercrust members, who may be intrigued by some of the leadership and cirriculum changes, may be locked out by the money issue. Which is unfortunate, because there’s great potential in an organization like this that gets young, energized creative people behind it.

I’m also kinda writing this to for all the kids out there to let them know that sometimes when you speak up for change you can make progressive things happen (even if no one acknowledges it).

This month’s Carnival of Journalism is topic specific: Finding time in a time-starved newspaper world to do ‘extra’ stuff for the web.

I’m not going to state the obvious philosophical argument that this isn’t ‘extra’ stuff anymore. …That the way our culture consumes information has fundamentally changed and with it print should be considered ‘extra’ since it’s the dying, incredibly labor-intensive medium. …And that reporters thinking a 20-inch print narrative that very few time-starved people will actually read about some random meeting takes a lot of ‘extra’ time to create, when a bulleted breakout succinctly discussing the changes that took place at the meeting and their impact on the community would take less time and better server the community.

…No, we’re not going to discuss that today because we should have evolved and understood that a couple years ago.

Today we’re talking about how to get more with less…

I propose a three-tiered approach to streamline and reorganize the news and information production process.

In order to implement this, there needs to be a slight culture change and everyone needs to understand what that plan is and be on board (later we’ll discuss how to deal with those not on board). There’s a slight change in work flow and communication patterns, but anyone who’s not completely incompetent or fearful of technology should be able to handle it with brief training. (Such as, “On a wiki, click ‘edit’ to edit the content,” etc.) The other ‘hard’ part of this plan is everyone needs to be on board and held accountable for holding up their portion of the plan. I know that’s hard for newsrooms to do sometimes, culture change is hard, but it’s mandatory for our survival. The core of this work flow is to start acting much more like a start up or other nimble technology company and less like a bureaucratic dinosaur.

Step 1:
Get some decent web-based collaboration and information organization/production tools and implement them across your entire organization.

There’s plenty of options in this arena, Base Camp is a favorite among the start-ups. It costs money though.

So for the cheapskates out there, Google offers a lot of tools individually for free — email, calendar, gtalk instant messaging, documents, spreadsheet, presentation and wiki collaboration tools.

The full-functioning wiki application (formerly Jotspot), now called Google Sites, could easily be used to manage story budgets in a newsroom, so that everyone can see what’s going on without having to attend multiple stand up meetings with people in ties reading the same printed budget out loud.

There’s even an enhanced premier edition that only costs $50 per user with plenty of benefits – including 25 GIGABYTES of storage per user. There’s many journalism organizations out there that only allow 30-100 megabytes of email storage space. Corporate journalism IT departments simply have not scaled with the digital age. I’m not even going to start going off about most organization intranets (or lack there of).

If you’re like me, you work on a web team that uses email as it’s primary means of notifying each other about projects, outages, changes, everything that happens in the day’s web production. Corporate run email accounts are like toilet paper – they expire quickly and when you’re out, you’re up shit creek. You’re loosing contacts for stories, updates and information that is critical for your organization’s survival. Universities understand this, why don’t we?

For me personally, an organization allowing me to use Gmail as a work account is worth at least a $4,000 raise. It’s exponentially better than Outlook. AND it saves me time and frustration. Outlook, despite it’s once-every-few-year minor updates, is not a tool for nimble work flow – it does have filters and some search capability, but no where close to the Gmail experience. And it’s definitely not an optimal tool for an organization juggling massive information flowing through it that needs to be organized, collaborated on, edited and republished quickly.

And I know what you’re thinking: Corporate policies and IT concerns will never allow email on a third party system. Well, they can cram it with walnuts. The paper tiger of ‘security’ is false, we’ve all heard people use that before when they just wanted to maintain unfettered, unquestioned control. Microsoft’s product vulerabilities are widely known and have been the target of hackers, spyware, malware and viruses since the dawn of the Internet. Beyond that, Outlook is purely a waste of money, including time (and therefore money) spent dealing with inept software. That time-as-money waste is almost as gross as the mountains of cash spent on the proprietary software that is causing this time suck. It’s a vicious circle.

While we’re evolving our email and project management tools, maybe it’s time to also consider evolving the Office tools and perhaps leaving Microsoft Office applications all together. Open Office is free and easily comparable if you MUST have desktop apps but I’d argue that most of the Google apps are comparable and sometimes better than the desktop competition — especially for collaborative projects. The also offer automatic saving, revision saving and all sorts of other goodies that you’ll find you didn’t know you really wanted, but once they save you time you’ll wish you never lived without them.

BONUS TIP:
Let me re-emphasize: When implementing this new work flow, it’s also important to do some brief training to show members of the newsroom how to optimize their use of the tools. For instance: How many folks in your newsroom know how to use email filters and automated tagging (if they get Gmail)? These can be tremendous time savers and without some basic training, Luddites may not take full advantage to optimize their time. And that’s what all this is about. Share the knowledge. Share the power. Give them back their time and save money for your company.

DOUBLE BONUS FOR BEAN COUNTERS:
Moving email and wiki/intranet tools over to Google for their $50 per user fee could easily pay for itself, as you’ll likely be able to reduce the number of IT staff necessary to maintain your internal network.

Do the math: $50 per user at a 1000-person organization (which is rather large number considering the drastic cuts across the country, this is a very liberal estimate) is $50,000. So basically, for cheaper than one IT staff member’s salary, you can streamline much of that department’s work for an all-around better product, an easier to use product with better support that will benefit your newsroom workflow and save resources and time, as well as save on hardware resources. (More money savings!)

And try to get your IT staff to offer true 24/7 support at the level Google will.

POTENTIAL RESULTS:
Imagine working simultaneously on a double-byline story with another reporter in another bureau in a Google Doc. Or cleaning up raw data with your CAR specialist at the same time for a big project in Google Spreadsheets. Or finding out that someone in features saw your story in the wiki for story budgeting and knows an awesome source for your big feature coming up this weekend. Or building smart filters and flagging systems into your email so you can focus on working and not deleting Russian spam messages every 15 minutes (seriously, Google’s spam filters, plus their acquisition of industry-leader, Postini, makes them the unprecedented king of the hill in spam protection without a doubt).

Step 2:
Murder Most Meetings

After you’ve implemented project management and collaboration tools it’s time to start using them, and stop wasting time going to budget meetings, acting like your paying attention all the while thinking about what you’re going to do this weekend.

Cutting down on the number of meetings people attend frees up lots of time. It’s 2008, there are dozens of online project management and collaboration tools out there. Why are newsrooms still holding 2-5 half-an-hour-long budget meetings a day?

That’s (half an hour of work) x (6 to 14 people) = 3 to 7 hours of work that could be spent doing something ‘extra’ each time you hold one of these meetings.

A great, quick primer on how to murder meetings is a quick book from a Chicago web-startup, called “Getting Real.” Distribute copies and require the entire staff to read it by a certain date. (Assign deadlines to all actions in newsrooms. Most journalists don’t do things without deadlines.) For those of you working for penny-pinching corporations such as $7,546,710-a-year-earning Craig A. Dubow’s, you can keep your overlords’ budgets happy, because it doesn’t cost a thing right here.

Hold a meeting (gasp!) to discuss the book afterwards, workflow changes, figure out if there are any new ideas that could improve on it and what meetings can be cut. Make sure everyone’s on board. Specifically make sure everyone understands the practices in respecting others time and meeting management:

Do you really need a meeting? Meetings usually arise when a concept isn’t clear enough. Instead of resorting to a meeting, try to simplify the concept so you can discuss it quickly via email or im or Campfire. The goal is to avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.

It’s nothing personal, we just all need to be awesome, and minimizing distractions helps do that:

Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy. It’s like rem sleep — you don’t just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.

BEFORE YOU FREAK OUT:
Now I’m not saying eliminate *all* meetings. Some are definitely vital and face-to-face time can be priceless, especially when dealing with difficult issues and those that involve emotion. But uninterrupted work time is important also. I’m just suggesting we re-evaluate how efficient we’re being. The formula will be different at many organizations. A good general ‘rule of thumb’ for me is, “If you have to go around the room and have each person say something at the meeting, this could just as easily be done with a collaborative document, where everyone updates what’s new with them and everyone can enter information, read it quickly and get back to work.”

BONUS TIP:
The entire Getting Real book is absolutely fantastic and while some of the examples apply more to software creation, the vast majority of the book is immensely applicable to media organizations — from staying lean, to building ‘half a product not a half-assed product,’ ‘hiring the right customers,’ creating in an iterative process, etc… It’s just so fantastic, succinct and ideal to how a modern business should run.) There’s also a bunch of resources at the end of this blog entry for more resources and books about GTD (or ‘getting things done’) as well as some examples of how other organizations optimize their internal structures, such as the Mark Hartnett-recommended book,  The Toyota Way.

POTENTIAL RESULTS:
Less meeting time = more time to get ‘extra’ online projects done.

Step 3:
Remove a layer of the organization hierarchy, reallocate those resources to do ‘extra’ stuff

With meetings tamed and story budgeting, collaboration and work flow streamlined using shared web tools, in many organizations you can probably start to reallocate full-time positions that used to be tasked with wearing a tie and attending dozens of meetings (We’re talking about middle-management) each day to other projects. Now they can focus on ‘extra’ stuff such as multimedia production, data procuring and presentation, social media efforts, etc. Everyone wins — they don’t feel dead inside anymore and the organization gets more ‘extra’ stuff.

If they resist the change and don’t want to evolve, Mark Hartnett has a solution.

POTENTIAL RESULTS:
More, higher-value ‘extra’ stuff gets done; Journalism is saved. The Ewoks throw a big party. George Lucas re-edits the footage years later and puts some horrible new song in there.

Related reading you might be interested in, if you read this freaking far (thanks, btw. I gotta start editing tighter):

+ The Four Hour Work Week
+ Living The 80/20 Way: Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More
+ The Toyota Way [ Via ]
+ Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
+ The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less
+ Getting Real
+ Lifehacker blog
+ The HUNDREDS of other “GTD” genre blogs, books and other resources
+ Bunches of more book recommendations on organization change and management