Here are my choices for top digital tools that every newsroom should be familiar with:

1)      Storify – A great tool that you can use to gather tweets, photos, Facebook posts and tons of other media on any subject or hashtag you can search for. It’s also great because you can pull only local tweets and each “story” is can be embedded on your site. We use it a lot for displaying extensive live coverage.

Examples:

Troy voter fraud trial - http://storify.com/troyrecord/troy-voter-fraud-trial-jan-2012

Current coverage of murder trial in 18-year-old case - http://storify.com/troyrecord/murder-trial-of-george-mott-iii-jan-2012

Coverage of NY Gov. Cuomo’s state budget proposal - http://storify.com/troyrecord/gov-cuomo-s-2012-2013-proposed-nys-budget

More at http://storify.com/troyrecord

2)      iMovie – I find iMovie to be invaluable if you’ve got a Mac around that you have access to (most JRC dailies have at least one desktop in their newsrooms, from what I understand). The software is more powerful and comes with better options than editing video in FlipShare or through Syndicaster.  It also makes slideshows ridiculously easy to put together and upload as a video file to our sites.

For anyone who doesn’t know how to use iMovie, I wrote up this tutorial recently for my staff: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mb2o23112DodfQiRdrnjHXImXsKLB7FYqsdHWJ9q3AY/edit?hl=en_US

Some examples of slideshows, videos, made with iMovie:

http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2012/01/24/sports/doc4f1e3edee644f770049195.txt

http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2011/12/15/news/doc4eea50267d094137129398.txt

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After some beneficial training from our colleagues in Journal Register Company, reporter Katie Nowak Roberts and I were given the task of using Google Voice to produce a crowd-sourced digital project on a local topic. After some initial trial and error, Katie's project became a huge success, gathering a whopping 170 responses.

Her final project - located here - has now been listened to nearly 160 times in just two days.

Who should fill the vacant Rensselaer County Legislature seats? by katieroberts


To illustrate how this happened and what she believed the benefits were, I asked Katie to write a few paragraphs on her experience. I encourage you to read what she wrote below and consider getting to know Google Voice as one of the most valuable tools in a digital journalist's arsenal.

Here's what Katie had to say:

"For my first Google Voice project, I asked our readers to share their New Year’s resolutions for 2012.
 I received zero responses.
 Dejected, I asked readers on Twitter for suggestions of other topics I could use that would perhaps get me the results I was looking for.
 Again, I received zero responses.
 Thanks to the quick thinking of our Digital Specialist, Tom Caprood, I was presented with perhaps the most perfect topic of them all: who people wanted to fill two vacant seats on the county legislature. There had been a lot of discussion and rumors floating around about who would get the jobs after former Democratic legislators Lou Rosamilia and Peter Ryan left those posts to become mayor and deputy mayor of the City of Troy, respectively. And it seemed almost inevitable that former mayor Harry Tutunjian would get one of the slots. (He did.) This seemed to be something people were passionate about, so I dutifully recorded my message on my Google Voice account and waited for messages.
 Almost immediately after we pushed out the question on Twitter, Facebook and our website, the calls started coming in, sparse at first, and then within minutes, sometimes seconds, of each other. By the end of the first day, I had 40 messages. By the time my Sunday deadline rolled around, I had 170.

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When we first set our ideaLab goals, I wanted to tackle having all of our reporters (news and sports) file their content from the field. My goal in this, besides just getting everyone familiar with the technology, was to help everyone realize that adjusting their work flow in this way could actually save them a fair amount of time and be more productive in their day-to-day schedules.

With our new reporters, this was a slow process due to the limited number of devices we have. I loaned out the netbook and iPad to reporters who were covering various court cases, town meetings, press conferences, and election parties – anything where they were out of the office and could take advantage of filing from the field while working on most of their articles remotely.

All of them have done this at least once now and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. They loved being able to use the netbook to take notes and write their articles as they went, rather than having to transcribe and try to read their own messy handwriting. They also like the immediacy of the process and how that especially helpful when reporting on deadline.

Sports reporters have been doing this for a while now and understand the benefits, as they spend most of every week out of the office covering their games, practices, and other events. Sometimes, such as when they're at high school games, they do not have traditional WI-FI to take advantage of or a real press box, so I'm lending them my ideaLab tools to help conquer that challenge.

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