Services to use:
Multimedia
- Youtube.com
- Blip TV
- Flickr (photo and slideshow)
- xTimeline
- Soundslide
- Google Maps
- Twitter (streaming headlines and updates to web and mobile)
- VUVOX
Programs to download / use
- Audacity
- iMovie (Mac) / Windows Movie Maker (Windows) [one or the other should have come with your computers]
- Foxit Reader (PDFs)
- All major Web browsers (besides IE)
Sites you should know:
- Feedburner (RSS feeds and stats)
- Text Link Ads (easy ads)
- Google News (aggregated news, use the alerts)
- Technorati (indexes and ranks blogs)
- Statcounter (stats)
- Google Analytics (stats)
Content Management Systems
- College Publisher (many papers)
- Wordpress (CSU Fresno)
- Wordpress Multiuser (The Temple News, Nevada Sagebrush)
- Drupal
- Django
- Ellington (very pricey)
- Joomla
- Other CMS
Blogs you should read
- Teaching Online Journalism
- Student Newspaper Survival Blog
- Innovation in College Media
- News Videographer
Other tips:
- Know ad rates for your competition, this includes blogs
- Offer an RSS feed for AT LEAST news and sports.
- Use the web to promote and make “evergreen” content such as dining guides
- Make sure article pages have a print view
- Take full advantage of tagging systems to lead readers between a columnist’s articles or a series you are running
- Have an “online only” section so readers can see the content they missed
- Have no registration, and have the barriers to comment and interact as low as possible (some may disagree, I know)
- Set up a wiki to add to what my friend Christopher Wink would call “institutional memory”
- Don’t forget that your paper’s Web site is still a Web site and should be crawlable by Google and Google News.
- If you have beats, make them each a section of your site with tags
- Some pictures may be black and white in the paper, put the color version online