3 Important Tools For Journalists & Writers!
I figured journalists out there needed to know about these things if they didn’t know already:
- Wotnews:
Create a profile, pick the kind of Australian news you want to hear about and Wotnews doesn’t just deliver everything, it delivers everything that the rest of the internet deems relevant. It sort of works out how many links each article has and uses that to figure out how worthwhile the news item is. There are also a few sources that always have their articles included such as ABC websites and so on. Absolutely great for journos. - Google Alerts:
Sign up for a gmail account for free. Basically any RSS feed can be read in Gmail. So keep your main account for all your other mail but direct any RSS feeds (such as Wotnews and so on) to this new Gmail account. Gmail stacks everything into conversations so that your inbox doesn’t get flooded with new emails. Set up Google Alerts for each specific subject you want to monitor – anything from news to who’s linking to your website. You get the option to set it up so that you get news “as it happens”, “daily” or “weekly”. Your other option is to get the RSS feeds directly from Reuters and AP and other wire services into your Gmail inbox as well.
- Help A Reporter Out:
If you are a journalist and you haven’t heard of this, you’ve been living under a rock. At the bottom of an extinct volcano. On a planet that isn’t even Earth. This service allows journalists to find sources for their stories. If you need a source badly, post a request to this site and it goes out to the email inboxes of over 50,000 sources. Extremely urgent requests get posted on the twitter at skydiver. If you are a company and would like more time in the media, post yourself as a source and respond to the requests that are tailored towards your company.
I hope this list helps some of you out. Toss your own two cents into the comments.
Cheers, Marisa.
6 Comments
Buddhima
Hello there 🙂 long time no see! hehe
a tip abt RSS, use Google Reader instead of Gmail. It’s specifically built for RSS 🙂
Marisa
Hi Buddhima,
Yes you can use Google Reader which usually requires you to have a google account/gmail account anyway. It’s just that I prefer Gmail – each alert is a seperate conversation with all the other information from the same alert attached and you see the latest one but can quickly flip back to any other one you want. SO even if I had 61 items on “books”, I’d see the 61st one but I could click the set of emails and see the 21st one. With Google Reader far as I am aware you have to keep clicking next/older and go back via pages to see a news item you wanted to see before.
But yeah to each his own. Also lots of people want things in their email inbox.
Definitely long time no see. What are you upto?
Cheers, Marisa.
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Buddhima
Ok you need to use Reader. You’ve got it wrong 😀
A single site’s feed is shown in 1 screen, you just have to scroll down, just like Gmail. And you can sort it latest/oldest, which Gmail can’t do.
You can arrange feeds into folders, you can share them, favourite them etc.
Basically it does a better job of RSS than Gmail. Of course you can still use email but Reader is more efficient in that sense. Power-user tools 🙂
I am upto a lot of things! I’ll fill you in elsewhere, not here hehe
Bailaman
Thanks for the links Marisa. Just a suggestion. Do away with the Kontera In text ADS and move over to Adsense. It pays better, less obtrusive and delivers relevant AD content that people will actually click.
Ltr!
Marisa
Hi,
I did put ads on but eventually decided it wasn’t worth it. So I took both Adsense and Kontera off. However, when I upgraded to the latest version of wordpress it may have accidentally reinstalled Kontera somehow. I will take the Kontera off the server and see. I cannot see any on the page and neither can a couple of other people though it keeps showing up in the Adblocker on FireFox. If you could point me to a specific example on a page somewhere on the site, I’d be grateful so I can fgure out why even when it isn’t activated it’s still showing up?
Thanks, Mari.