The Carnival of Journalism results are in and I’m furious with myself that I just thought of ‘hacks for hacks’ as a semi-clever title for the project. … Anyway, last month we asked for your suggestions on the best life/workflow/info/journalism hacks to help us all get faster, better, smarter and working harder. Thanks to everyone who contributed. There’s so many awesome tips, tools and techniques here, please check them out and then get to back to rocking out productively!

• Paul Bradshaw breaks down his hacks into the techniques of: Shortcuts, Automation, Habits, Discipline.
• Aram Zucker-Scharff shares many different ideas including, how Kindle 3G rocks, the WordPress “After the Deadline” plugin, the powers of Boolean logic, plus bonus time management tools
• Jonathan Groves offers iPhone hacks for using your iPhone as a jack-of-all-trades media device
• André Natta focuses on technique tips to maximize your productivity
• Mary Hamilton offers a wealth of valuable time-saving technique tips
• Emma Carew offers tips from never getting lost in the parking garage to a keyboard shortcut to resurrect tabs you accidentally close
• Steve Outing offers tips from banking to maintaining “Inbox Zero” on your email
• Kathy Gill offers a plethora of Twitter tools, as well as iPad and desktop apps
• Fellow RJI Fellow David ‘Zog’ Herzog has some awesome apps for those of us PC folks out there, especially interested in data and programming for journalism
• Dr. Jack Rosenberry offers insight on using Google Docs for teaching journalistic writing
• Sheree Martin shows the importance a healthy ‘life’ in those ‘lifehacks’ with her insightful post
• Jackie Borchardt also recommends exercise, along with a gaggle of other tools
• Carrie Brown-Smith discusses how she hacks and controls her social media time and more tricks of the trade
• David Cohn gives away his brilliant Viddler technique for the flood of interview requests he gets, and many more tips
• Rick Martin goes above and beyond offering a video tutorial on how to use Markdown in Textmate
• Denise Cheng offers tools to work with devs, filtering feeds and a bonus tool to find your phone
• Benét J. Wilson, who I just met this weekend, offers her top five tools including two must-read books
• Joy Mayer shows off her combo of Delicious and Remember The Milk to rock out using tags for her classes
• Steve Fox tells us to, “Get up out of your seat and go talk to people!“
• Josh Braun offers tips to tools that are especially handy to writers
• Megan Taylor breaks down her tips in a succinct link guide
• ….and finally, 5 more tips from me (in addition to the original dozen or so in the call to action for the carnival)

Greetings Carnies!
For this installment of the Carnival of Journalism we’re going to go ultra practical:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

As a recovering RSS-aholic, (my Google Reader account peaked around 2,100 about a year and half ago, I’ve paired it down to 931 currently and am looking to drop that by a half this summer) I’ve always marveled at people like Robert Scoble who seems to be everywhere and tracking everything. Part of this is because he’s an information hound, part social media addict and it’s also part his job to be out there in the conversation with the tech industry. Tim Ferris interviewed him four years ago about his 600+ feeds and how he digs through them for good information.

In my effort to cull my RSS feeds, I’ve relied much more on social networks for network curation but in that transition I realized I was doing it wrong, again. This Winter while meeting with a group of news nerds talking about their workflows, most confessed that they read only a very small portion of their Twitter alerts. At this time, I was close to reading around 70-80+% (obviously that fluctuated but on the average day I’d hit that number or higher); almost everyone else in the room was in the 5-15% range.

So during 2011, I’ve tried to focus on finding more tools and techniques to help boost productivity and save time, while not compromising the quality of information/work completed. Everyone has different ideas on what makes their workflow work, and while sites like Lifehacker.com does a fantastic job, I believe journalists especially manage and filter a lot of information every day, so it would be fascinating to share some of our best practices with the JCarn community.

So for instance, what tools, plugins, apps and websites do you use to get the most out of the day?
For example, here are a few that I’ve tried at various times:

• Use a personalized aggregates like TweetedTimes, Summify or Flip Board on the iPad
• Use Tweetdeck to track social network updates, then clear the ones you’ve already read using the “Clear All” button in the column so you only read stuff you haven’t seen
• Build a series of custom Google alerts to track topics and filter it using Yahoo Pipes
• Tracking , filtering and sharing your archive and bookmarks through Delicious, Diigo, or Pinboard (Journerdism’s Jambalaya Links have been half published by using Delicious for years)

What work techniques and strategies have you learned over the years that help boost your productivity and effectiveness?
More examples of things I’ve tried to get you thinking:

• Only use the “http://five.sentenc.es/” technique for (most) email responses (Or four or three or two sentences)
• If it’s not time-critical, try to focus on emailing people around 8-9 a.m. in the morning so it’s at the top of their mailbox as soon as they get in, responses tend to be higher because they haven’t developed email fatigue yet
• Use the phone / IM for all quick messages, only check mail twice a day as Tim Ferris recommends in the Four-Hour Workweek
• Use the 37 Signals “Getting Real” technique for managing and organizing effective meetings

Other ideas?

• What do you read each day to get the most bang for your buck? I love the series the Altantic does about this with various gadflies and influentials on their content consumption habits.
• How do you stay up to date on your beat and interest areas? Marshall Kirkpatrick posted an amazing behind the scenes guide to how he tracks tech for Read Write Web
• How do you find stories, track and filter information on your beat/interest areas? I really dug the ingenuity of this reporter using their site search analytics to find uncovered story ideas.
• How and what do you track to see what’s working and what’s not in your workflow? Personal analytics is a fascinating area to track, test, iterate and improve your performance.
• What do you find it’s better to just pay for rather than spend the time doing? iAnnotate is an iPad app that I love for quickly signing off on PDF’s and documents for papers and contracts that require signatures (rather than trying to find a printer, printing it off, signing it, then scanning or faxing the pages)
• … What else?

Our deadline for publishing will be Friday, June 10th. I hope we can all help each other become better, more productive and informed journalists.

This month the Carnival of Journalism asks:

Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?

We’re currently at a turning point in communication, where just as the proliferation of cheap/free and easy blogging software saw a digital publishing revolution explode, the proliferation of mobile reporting and publishing platforms will as Clay Shirky once said “… let a thousand flowers bloom…” in offering more diverse and direct sources of news.

We’ve most recently seen how during the Egyptian revolution that mobile reporting tools in the hands of a community helped get the news out, even in the face of amazing adversity when the government shut down the Internet and tried to choke mobile coverage.

As part of my fellowship at Reynolds, I’ve helped collect and share a massive resource for mobile reporting tools and best practices.

To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin’s fictitious dialogue in The Social Network:

“A million news sources isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion news sources.”

With mobile reporting tools, the latter is very possible (actually 4.6 billion news sources, as of Feb. 15, 2011).

Separating the wheat form the chaff to filter, curate and find quality news content in the flood of sources is another monstrous challenge in itself. … but maybe that’s next month’s carnival.

Disclosure: The b-b-b-b-billion gif idea was totally jacked from Zach Seward’s amazing Ignite presentation.

I hate to be that guy, but before or very soon after you see “The Social Network,” you should really read the book(s).

The movie is amazingly shot, edited, musically-scored and written like any great fiction piece of our time, but it’s being passed off as non-fiction, which is difficult for me to swallow.

I’m not a huge Facebook fanboy. I respect the site. I’ve met and talked with people who work at Facebook (largely around mobile geo projects). I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg at all. I have seen him speak a couple times at South by Southwest, I’ve read dozens of articles about him and Facebook — largely because their creative culture fascinates me — specifically, how he maintains creative control in such a large and quickly evolving organization, what they’ve learned from such a large and diverse user base about how humans interact in the digital landscape and how modern “intellectual property” laws apply to web/software ideas.

Fueling this interest over the Spring, I read both “The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick (written by a former Fortune reporter who trailed Mark Zuckerberg for years working on this book about the company) and “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich (an author known for taking a creative, literary style with non-fiction events, who worked with Eduardo Saverin, the original Facebook co-founder/CFO who was kind of slowly removed from the company after it took off and Zuckerberg maintained creative and tech control).

I suggest reading Mezrich’s first, since it’s what the movie was largely based upon (with a HEAVY dose of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s ‘Hollywood movie magic’ re-scripting and massaging of events). If you can get through all Mezrich’s overly-flowery prose, absent-third-party speculation, truthiness, one-sided view of the events surrounding Facebook’s founding from the side of the guy who got screwed out of billions and you’re any sort of an ethical journalist, you’ll see why this bothers me. This piece from Slate raises a lot of similar concerns. This is also another excellent view of the movie making process from Slate. (Via Kelvin Ma)

While critics are falling all over themselves praising this movie as this generation’s Citizen Kane, and journalists/tech correspondents generally seem to be doing the same, there are huge gaps in the story filled by speculation from a creative writer that just became a major motion picture and will become in our culture *the* official story of Facebook.

The Facebook Effect is definitely an interesting read and appears more accurate — and at least sourced, not filled with speculation and flowery narrative to fill in factual holes. Kirkpatrick may be a little too close to Zuckerberg, like some tech reporters can get with their subjects for access, but he’s not gaga or trying to spin the story into the first epic film for the digital generation.

I guess fundamentally what bothers me about The Social Network and Mezrich’s writing is how I’ve seen similar ‘truthiness’ in journalism. Everyone talks about how critical storytelling, storytelling, storytelling is. And it is, don’t get me wrong. But not if it subverts truth. The need to spin a story to find an angle or find a controversy or narrative arc really bothers me.

Zuckerberg / Facebook’s rise to fame is fascinating and unique enough, fabricating the truth to cast characters into clear roles as simply villains, good guys and pieces of meat (basically every female character in the movie) isn’t necessary. This story is more interesting than that and this generation deserves a smarter Citizen Kane than that.

As chain-smoking scientist Ray Arnold in Jurassic Park says:

Hold onto your butts sound bite Samuel L. Jackson sound bites

6/10/10 UPDATE: So this whole mysterious QR Code has been a rather unsuccessful experiment, only proving that no one knows about or actually uses QR Codes except maybe 2-3 percent of the population. I did a similar post on our internal intranet at work and only a handful of folks knew what to do. Eventually it’s spread virally and well… most people were more annoyed than delighted to learn about a new technology. Which should be a good lesson for what I’m doing:

I’m taking off from the Post-Dispatch in August to head west for a year-long fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (located at the University of Missouri). I’ll be researching and independently studying mobile web development, specifically focusing on using mobile geo-located devices for news, social and multimedia content creation and consumption. I’ll be studying some traditional news orgs, some non-traditional news orgs but mainly a whole lot of non-news orgs to learn about the emerging technology and learning best practices, applications and new developments.

If you have any suggestions of folks I should definitely talk to in the mobile technology space, if you have questions yourself that your news org is struggling to deal with about mobile, if you have ideas about how this fellowship could help journalism, or if you have anything else you’d like to share — please don’t hesitate to contact me at will {at} journerdism.com. This is literally going to be an academic year, free for me to work on an fully ‘independent study’ (no teaching requirements, no class requirements, no dancing the tango in Argentina like some other fellowships) so I’m hoping I can really learn a lot and share the ideas (both of successes and failures–like the QR code on this blog ;D) with the news industry to move adoption and understanding of the mobile web along much faster (especially compared to how long it took news orgs to really buy into the web).

This will be an awesome adventure. Please join me and share your thoughts and suggestions.