In the second of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about dealing with the large amount of information that magazine editors receive. Managing information overload A magazine editor now has little problem finding information on a range of topics. It is likely that you will have subscribed to email newsletters, RSS feeds, Facebook groups and
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A few weeks back I wrote about my ‘network infrastructure’ – the combination of social networks, an RSS reader and social bookmarking that can underpin a person’s journalism work. As I said there, the social bookmarking element is the one that people often fail to get, so I wanted to further illustrate how I use Delicious specifically, with a case
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For some years now, I have started every online journalism course I teach with an introduction to three key tools: RSS readers, social networks, and social bookmarking. These are, I believe, the basis of a network infrastructure which few modern journalists – whatever their platform – can do without. The word ‘network’ is key here – because I believe one
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During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is. In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it
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I’ve been meaning to write a post for some time breaking down all the habits and hacks I’ve acquired over the years – so this month’s Carnival of Journalism question on ‘Hacking your journalism workflow’ gave me the perfect nudge. Picking those habits apart is akin to an act of archaeology. What might on the surface look very complicated is simply
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When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for? To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform,
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Despite the incredible work done on the spreadsheet comparing social bookmarking services I am yet to find one that does everything that I use Delicious for (background here). One service I have been using, however, is Trunk.ly. Once you’ve imported your existing bookmarks from Delicious Trunk.ly stores any new ones you bookmark on Delicious, keeping the backup up to date. In
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For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with a new web service and mobile app called Springpad. LifeHacker describes it as a “super advanced personal assistant”. And I can see particular applications for journalists and editors. Here’s how it works: Investigating on the move, and online In Springpad you create a ‘notebook’ for each of your projects. You
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UPDATE: I’ve created a spreadsheet where you can add information about the various services and requirements. Please add what you can. Delicious, it appears, is going to be closed down. I am hugely sad about this – Delicious is possibly the most useful tool I use as a journalist, academic and writer. Not just because of the way it makes
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