There’s nothing like the smell of documents in the morning: Great, powerful, telling documents — documents confirming that the mayor really was running a meth lab in the basement of City Hall. Or that the county commission chairman really was betting county workers’ pension money on illicit goat-roping contests. Or that the police chief really did show up to work one day drunk, wearing only his boxer underwear, singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in the style of Tiny Tim.

So now that you’ve got these great documents, how do you show them off online?

In my last post for Net Worked, I talked about software you can use to scan in and optimize your PDFs, and why optimizing PDFs rocks (for both you and your readers). This time, let’s talk about presenting those documents online.

First, let’s start with how you actually get your documents online.

One way is to upload the files directly to your Web server, either using your publication’s content-management system or using an FTP program like FileZilla or, another one I’ve used sometimes, CoffeeCup FTP.

But then there’s also Scribd.com, a free service that lets you upload PDFs and which converts them to Flash presentations. That’s really cool because it means that readers can quickly scroll through a big PDF file and find some relevant page in the back without having to see that “downloading … downloading … downloading” message across their screen (and you know what I mean if you’ve ever had to upload a 600-page government report to your site. Why does the government always put the interesting stuff in the back of the reports?).

Using Scribd also means that those huge reports don’t eat up a bunch of your Web server space, because the file is sitting on Scribd’s servers. There’s also some social networking capability to the site, too, so people can “friend” you and subscribe to your documents, and you can return the favor.

The site I work for, a nonprofit news site called Texas Watchdog, uses Scribd quite a bit. We like that we can upload a document and make it “private” — shielding it from access by the entire world, but allowing our reporters to access it via e-mailed invitations — and then quickly throw the switch to publish them to all the InterWebs when we’re ready to publish our story.

Then there’s also Google Docs. Google Docs will let you upload and share a PDF with the world that’s up to 10 megabytes. This service is also free.

(There may yet be other services out there for PDF-sharing — if you know of others that people should try, please comment below!)

So, once you’ve got your documents uploaded to the Web in some way, how do you present those documents online?

The easiest thing to do is simply link from the story text to the PDF in question.

I’ve seen people do bulleted lists of document links at the end of their stories, like this:

+ PDF of the mayor’s arrest report
+ PDF of city workers’ e-mails discussing the mayor’s arrest
+ PDF of the mayor’s e-mails in which he says he “just loves making illegal meth”

But I’m not terribly jazzed about this approach. For one thing, you never know if a reader will read all the way to the end of the story to see those links.

Plus, it’s inconvenient for the reader. If I come across a passage in the third graf that makes reference to a document, I might want to click on that document right then and see it for myself. My personal preference is to link phrases in the story to the documents to which they refer — a little bit like putting footnotes in a school term paper, only through the Web.

Scribd.com offers a fancier approach: It enables you to embed the Flash presentation of your document in the story text. I think this is just cool as heck, but I’ve had trouble getting it to work for readers using Internet Explorer. Some of them have told me they just see a big blob of white space on the page where the document is supposed to be. We stopped using the Scribd embed function after we heard that. I hope that eventually it will work for all browsers.

But here’s something that’s more reliable. You can use the front page of the document — or a picture that zooms in on one key phrase or passage in the document — as an art element in your story or post, and then make that art element a hyperlink to the PDF of the document.

When I worked in the Tennessean newsroom in Nashville, we used to call these “document tears” when they were used in the print edition — they looked like they had been torn from a document and put onto the newspaper page. So that’s what I call these today when I create them for Texas Watchdog.

To create a document tear, you have at least two options. If you have access to Adobe Photoshop or other picture-editing software, you should be able to open the PDF file in Photoshop and simply save the first page of the PDF as a .jpg file. (If you want to spotlight one passage in the document, you can use the crop tool to cut out all the rest of the picture.) Then you can save the file for publication on the Web (72 dpi, I believe) and upload the newly created .jpg like any other photograph you might use on your site.

If you don’t have Photoshop or another photo editing program that will open a PDF, you can also do it the old-fashioned way: Get out the digital camera and take picture of the piece of paper. Then download that photo from the camera, crop it as needed and upload it to your site.

After you’ve got the picture of the document, or the document tear, uploaded, insert it at the requisite spot in the story text. Then, go back and get the URL of the PDF file of the document — whether it’s on your Web server, on Scribd or stored as a Google Doc — and copy that URL into the clipboard. Now, switch back over to where you’re working in the story text and wrap the A HREF HTML tags around the .jpg of the document tear so that the picture file itself becomes a hyperlink to the document URL.

But I’m sure those aren’t the only ways to present documents online. What are some of the tips you can share with our readers?

Jennifer Peebles is deputy editor at Texas Watchdog in Houston. E-mail her at jennifer(at)texaswatchdog.org. You can find her on Twitter (@jpeebles), on MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Newsvine, Publish2 and more Nings than she can keep track of.

If you had to find someone stuck in traffic on an expressway during a snow storm for a story, could you do it?

Chicago Tribune reporter James Janega did.

Finding that source could have been a difficult task, but James knew he had options. He logged in to Twitter, did a quick search, and soon found a woman who was tweeting while sitting in traffic. He messaged her on Twitter and soon they were chatting by phone. Within minutes James had the source and information he needed.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are excellent resources when searching for sources and story ideas. Of course, once a source is found on a social network, it’s the journalist’s responsibility to do the proper checks to verify who that person claims to be, and follow up with a proper interview in person or over the phone. Nevertheless, these sites can help you find folks by interest, profession, location and more, which means it’s increasingly important for us to come up with best practices when using these sites.

Dozens of organizations, including The Associated Press and the BBC, have created their own social media policies. If you’re interested in using social networks to find sources, I’d recommend chatting with your editor to learn more about your own newsroom’s view on this. At the Chicago Tribune we have our own social media guidelines that I view as best practices. Many of the guidelines echo our newsroom editorial principles: truth and integrity, objectivity and accountability, and proper sourcing.

If your newsroom embraces the idea of finding sources via social networks, you’re in luck. There are a number of sites that will help you find exactly who you’re searching for.

6 easy ways to find sources:

Twitter search – This is the advanced version of the Twitter search you can perform on your Twitter homepage. You can search for folks based on Tweet keyword, by username, by location, date, attitude and more. This is your best option if you’re trying to find that person stuck in traffic.

If you like Twitter search, also try Twazzup. It’s similar to Twitter search, but it also displays popular links related to that search term, suggested users, news, photos and more.

Twellow – “The Twitter Yellow Pages” allow you to search for users by their bios’ keywords and general interests. It’s perfect for finding folks interested in a certain beat or hobby, like photography.

Try Twellowhood to search by interest and location.

If you like Twellow, also try WeFollow, which also lists users by interest.

Facebook search – Facebook has been working on its search abilities the past few months, and now it allows you to search by people, posts by friends (including photos, links, status updates, notes and more), groups and Web results.

Have you used these tools before? Do you have your own favorites? Let us know!

Amanda Maurer is the online and social media producer at the Chicago Tribune, and blogs at acmaurer.com. You can also follow her on Twitter at acmaurer.

News has always been something people shared – whether over the dinner table or the watercooler. Today UGC (user-generated content) applications make it easier than ever for people to share what is newsworthy to them online. Instead of being passive consumers of the news viewers can join the conversation by uploading and submitting images and videos of local community events.

UGC is not a new concept. For example, letters to the editor have been around for quite some time. However, the ease of use, low cost (typically free or free with online registration) and availability of UGC is increasing the amount of citizen journalism content being generated.

Luckily, for budding citizen journalists, these days it’s hard to find a local new organization that isn’t promoting its user-generated content application.

With news organizations around the nation suffering financially – having thousands of feet on the street potentially shooting the next ‘it’ story – there is a lot to get excited about when it comes to UGC.

There are also some concerns…below is an excerpt of my interview with former WGN radio news director Wes Bleed addressing the topics of UGC, citizen journalism and the news-gathering process.

Q: As a former news director, how do you view user submitted photo and video content?

A: Using user submitted content is always something that I would be hesitant about in the sense that you just don’t know where it’s coming from. Well, you might know where it’s coming from but you might not have a handle on how you got it. Did you get it because somebody had just simply gone out and shot video or recorded sound and did nothing else but just send it to you?  Or was there some kind of editing in the pre-stages before you got it? Well if that’s the case then now you don’t really know just what you ended up with. So that’s always a problem. You also don’t know necessarily how reliable the person is. Again, is it just Joe Citizen trying to be a good guy? Or is it somebody trying to get his name out there to get attention for himself? So on and so forth. So I have a lot of questions about it. Now having said all the downsides, now the upside is you can get people involved. You can get some very interesting shots, stills, video perhaps some kind of Magruder type film that nobody else would possibly have. So you never want to dismiss it out of hand, but you just have to be very careful about it. So that’s my big thing, be careful about it. Try to figure out where it came from. At the same time embrace the possibilities that it does present.

When news organizations embrace UGC submitted content they make users more loyal and encourage users to be more engaged with the Web site. One of the added-values of news organizations promoting and highlighting UGC submissions is that it builds brand preference with viewers offline – beyond the air-waves, beyond the broadcast, and beyond a Web site.

Looking to inspire citizen journalists in your community? Wes Bleed informs citizen journalists of what it takes to make it from the UGC platform to the broadcast.

Q: If there is a citizen journalist who is watching this and they want to know how will their content make the cut. Instead of being just user submitted content it makes it onto the air or makes it onto the website and it gets highlighted in some fashion. What qualities or how would you evaluate a user submitted content that would make the cut that would go beyond just the user generated platform?

A: I think it has to be the unique value of what that is. If a tornado rolls through your town and you happened to have your camera in the car and instead of taking cover you take a moment to video the tornado and nobody else does…your video is going to be used all over the place, my guess is. If many people are shooting and recording and video-ing certain things than the best is going to be used and yours may be pushed down in terms of that unique quality. So I think it all has to do with the story. With the interest in the story and certainly with your unique offering. Are you the first on the scene? Are you like the guy that twittered the first photo of the plane in the Hudson? Everybody saw that. And it was because it was unique and timely and it was of a very perishable nature, in the sense that that scene, nobody else could get because the plane was sinking. So that was a terrific shot. It all goes back to again, what else is there? What’s the story? What’s the interest level? And what did you provide?

Several examples of UGC applications:

• Ning

• KickApps

• Crowdvine

• GoingOn

Hilary Fosdal is the Interactive Content Manager for Barrington Broadcasting Group. You can follow her on Twitter and read more of her work on Running for Food.

Alex Payne Keynote: The Business Value of Twitter from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

See the official conference site at http://140tc.com.

Earlier I wrote about content being king, no matter the medium (i.e., journalism c. 1700s or journalism 3.0), see “Kicking it Old School.” I since ran into another timeless idea for business and journalism. 

I’m on this digital media committee, I founded an online news start-up directory, inothernews.us, and most of us journos are scrambling to learn the latest digital system that will help us compete in the journalistic workforce.

But this blog entry is about one mainstay in American commerce: the business card.

I am huge advocate of entrepreneurial journalism, and just as reporters are having to adapt and re-adjust their thinking to today’s digital necessities, they may be forgetting to distinguish themselves through business cards as they venture into freelance territory. 

According to the 2009 Layoff Tracker Report, a survey released earlier this month by Unity, Journalists of Color, Inc., an alliance of ethnic minority journalism groups, since Sept. 15, 2008 (the Lehman Brother’s collapse), the journalism industry lost jobs at almost three times the rate of jobs lost in the general economy each month. 

The group states: UNITY’S 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows an average 22% increase in journalism jobs lost each month from September 2008 through August 2009. In contrast, the economy shed jobs at an average page of plus 8% each month during the same period. 

Since Sept. 15 of last year, the news industry lost 35,885 jobs; and if you go back nine months, to Jan. 1, 2008, when Unity began tracking the industry downsizing, the job loss count rises to 46,599, according to the report. 

And 201 media outlets have closed, also since January 2008. 

The figures were compiled through company self-reporting and through group research. 

That climate of staggering media job losses means that’s a lot of unemployed journalists who are going the freelancing route, or who are not attached to an established outlet. That doesn’t mean you can’t advertise your own service. 

What got me thinking about the necessity of a business card was I attended a journalism networking mixer in Washington, D.C., this month, at the National Press Club. I was laid off from my newspaper job in March, and I am trying to forge a digital freelance writer gig for myself. 

Announcing it is one thing; offering this information in a more permanent medium, on a card, is another. I went to this mixer without cards and was caught unawares — people, other journalists, working journalists, wanted my information and I had to scribble it on notepads, on the back of borrowed cards. 

Business cards can be easily ordered on the Internet and they are inexpensive. One reporter who has started his own community news site covering a section of Los Angeles at theeastsiderla.com, recommended vistaprint.com, which offers 250 business cards starting at $5.99. Do an Internet search to shop around; there are several other companies offering competitive pricing and services. 

I tested Vistaprint and you can play around with the designs online. Their software allows you to pick a design, or go the custom route, and input your information to see how it will look before you purchase it. 

No matter what your skill set is or what service you want to offer, put it on a business card and have it ready to hand to anyone who asks about what you do. 

Digital Media Committee member Jessica Durkin is going to get business cards this month. She’s LinkedIn, Facebooked, Twittered , has two e-mail accounts and two phone numbers. It’s time to put it on paper. Jessica, who is based in Scranton, PA, is also the Region 3 Director for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

I’ve been asked by many reporters how much it cost me to learn how to design a website, edit digital video, use Photoshop, produce digital slideshows, and now create animated graphics and logos.  Well it was cheaper than you think.

Almost two years ago, I went full force learning everything I could about multimedia tools right after I lost my television reporting job in Dallas. I thought I needed to learn more, but for as little money as possible.  My husband is supporting us, but I didn’t want him to think I was going hog wild on my spending.

I “Googled” everything, and quickly learned there were many multimedia and digital media workshops being taught by professionals.   I thought wonderful until I saw the price for a one week workshop.  Digital video classes in New York City were one thousand bucks! Photoshop classes were nothing cheap. Video editing classes in Los Angeles were also a hefty price.  This didn’t include hotel and airfare expense. 

So I put my reporting skills to work and started looking in my backyard.  I found a community college in Dallas that offered all the classes I needed.  I’ve now taken three web design classes, one Photoshop class, and currently I’m working on two animation classes.  And guess what?  Each class has cost me $124 dollars.  

Do the math; I’ve spent a little over 700 dollars on six classes.  Remember, I found classes for 1,000 dollars for ONE WEEK.   So there’s no need to spend lots of money on learning the new digital media. 

Here’s another tip if you don’t have a community college in your area offering you what you need.  A videographer friend asked me to do a workshop for some of his clients.  I told him I’d do it for free if he taught me the basics of Final Cut Pro.  He got something and I got something.  When all else fails—share your talents.

I do have my “special class money ” jar where I have funds saved up for that one class I know I need to spend a little extra on.  My choice is the Poynter Institute.  I’m headed there this week, and will blog in the near future about my experience there. 

 Until next time!

Rebecca Aguilar

Please submit your ideas to spj_dmc@yahoo.com.

(Written by Joe Skeel, Interim Co-Executive Director) – Select staff members will be gathering for a meeting on Oct. 6 and 7 to discuss a new and improved SPJ.org. We have lots of ideas about making the site an unparalleled destination for our members while being a great resource to other journalists and members of the public.

However, I’m reaching out to you today to ask for your help. If you could all take some time between now and the end of the month and ask yourself this question in relation to your specific committee: What could we do that would make SPJ.org the go-to spot (for members and non-members) in my area of expertise?

Please submit your ideas directly to me. I have heard from some of you already in the past year or so. But if you have new ideas to offer, I’m all ears.

Grab a pencil, and mark your calendar for Sept. 18…..at precisely 12 noon, Eastern Standard Time.

That’s when Columbia J-School will present Advanced Facebook for Journalists – a live webcast that will show you how to use FB to find sources, story ideas, and a wider audience for your work.  You can even call in and submit questions to the show.

(And if you miss it, don’t fret. The show will be recorded and available for download, so you can listen at your leisure. )

Emily Sweeney is a staff reporter at The Boston Globe. You can follow her on Twitter  (@emilysweeney) and see more of her work on her website, www.spikeyem.com.

When I worked at a mid-sized daily newspaper, we had a simple process for getting PDFs of documents posted on the Web: Paper clip them together, put a Post-It note on them describing what they were, and hand them to someone in the Online Department. As if by magic, they appeared the next day online, hyperlinked from our story.

But I left the mid-sized daily newspaper a year ago to work with two friends at a startup online newspaper. And I’ve had to get educated in a hurry about making PDFs.

I suspect a lot of y’all out there are in the same boat as I was, so I’ll try to share with you some things I learned the hard way.

If you’re like us at all, you do a lot with PDFs — our focus is on local and state government and government transparency, so we get a lot of public records and post them online, including government officials’ calendars, their e-mails, their annual ethics forms, you name it. Most of these come to us as paper documents that we have to scan in — and scanning them in can to create massive PDF files that are unwieldy, both for us and for our readers.

But I got educated about something called optimization. Basically, optimizing a PDF crunches down the file size — I’ve seen it reduce the size of a PDF to just a third of what it was. (I’m not an expert, but I think it largely involves tossing out some of the data associated with the blank white spaces on the paper document.)

Optimizing PDFs is awesome. We went from posting huge files that choked our readers’ browsers to much more manageable file sizes that are quicker for people to download and read.

So, how do you optimize? I’m afraid you can’t do it in the free Acrobat Reader program. But here are two for-pay programs that can do it (notice: I am not a paid spokesman for either manufacturer.) One is the pro version of Adobe Acrobat, which I think right now is version 9.0. It retails for about $699 and is also included in the full version of the Adobe Creative Suite 4 package (which retails for about $2,400, I think). It gives you some options in terms of how much image quality will be lost when it crunches down the file.

Another program, one that’s much cheaper, is Nitro PDF. It sells for about $99 a copy. Nitro can also do optimize.  (Note: I am not a paid spokesman for either project, just a user.)

But those aren’t the only cool things that those programs can do that will help journalists.

Another cool feature of both programs is that they’ll allow you to combine multiple PDFs into one file. This is really handy when you’re trying to scan in some 800 pages of printouts from the mayor’s calendar but the document feeder on your scanner will only take 25 pages at a time: Generate one PDF for each 25 pages, and when you’re all done scanning, combine them all into one file.

And both programs will allow you to remove pages from a PDF file — handy for when you accidentally get, say, a freelancer’s invoice mixed up in the pile of pages from the mayor’s calendar being scanned in. Just delete that one page of the freelancer invoice from the PDF. Or, “extract” the freelancer invoice and save it as its own PDF.

Both programs will also allow you to reorder pages within PDFs — handy for when you accidentally put April 19 after the April 20 page before you stick the whole sheaf into the scanner.

And Acrobat has one other really handy feature that Nitro does not have: Redaction — it has a small toolbox of gizmos that let you black out stuff.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — we’re journalists, we hate redaction! Why would we redact something? Well, what about a source who leaks you a document via fax? You might not want to display that person’s name and fax number to the whole world. Or say you get a document through a public records request that has someone’s Social Security number on it — the records custodian was supposed to redact it before he/she gave it to you, but it slipped through, and now you have it. Unless someone can give me some really good journalistic reason for it, I tend to be reluctant to blast that person’s Social all over the InterWebs. My initial instinct is, let’s black out their Social before we post the PDF file. (And there are other programs that will redact as well — search under “PDF redaction” on Google and they’ll turn up.)

I’m far from being a PDF expert. That’s why I’m still working my way through a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Bible. But what I’ve learned so far has saved me a lot of headaches. I’d love to hear what other tips and tricks new media folks can share.

Jennifer Peebles is deputy editor at Texas Watchdog in Houston. E-mail her at jennifer(at)texaswatchdog.org. You can find her on Twitter (@jpeebles), on MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Newsvine, Publish2 and more Nings than she can keep track of.

The most accurate answer is that a 3G network is one that follows an international standard for wireless communications (see: IMT-2000). Unfortunately, this is not the most helpful answer. As journalists, this may happen to you often, getting technically correct answers that don’t address what the question is really about. The goal of this column is to help correct that.

So now for the better, more helpful, answer.

3G is a third generation data network that lets you get online using your mobile phone. Yes you want it. Tethering is one of the cooler things that can be done with a 3G mobile phone.

A 3G network is a data network that allows (relatively) high speed data to be transferred wirelessly to and from your mobile phone. A data network is what lets you get online. If you can operate a web browser on your mobile phone you have a data network plan.

There are alternatives to 3G, most are slower, like for example EDGE. Check out the YouTube video to the right for a side-by-side speed comparison.

Which data networks (2G, 2.5G, 3G, EDGE, etc) are available depend on which provider you choose (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc) and which mobile phone you choose (iPhone, Blackberry Curve, etc).

All mobile phones are not created equal. I’ve never seen a mobile phone with a data plan that doesn’t have a web browser, but whether or not you’ll be able to record video and upload it to YouTube (and how long that will take) is something you’ll need to verify with your carrier.

One of the more tech-tastic things that some data plans/mobiles support is tethering.

Tethering is what you are doing when you connect your mobile phone, either via Bluetooth or through USB, to your computer and the mobile phone shares it’s data network with your computer. Once that happens, you should be able to use your computer as though it were online. The network speed won’t be as fast as it would be on a land line, but you’ll have access to all the online tools you are used to.

Tethering is definitely not something every plan/phone supports. If you want to be able to do this, check with your carrier.

Things are always changing in the tech world so it’s good to keep your eye on new developments.

Here are some I’m watching: tethering is becoming more and more popular so I think more carriers are going to support it, some sooner than others. Also not so far off are 4G networks. Promising faster speed, 4G networks should be very popular.

Want to read more?

• Wikipedia: 4G Networks
• Sprint 4G Networks
• Sprint 4G/3G Routers Support Up to 32 Simultaneous Wi-Fi Connections
• iPhone: Cellular Data Network Access
• AT&T Upgrading 3G Network

So this brings me to the end of the first post. The last thing I want to let you know is that this is just the first post. I want you to send me your tech questions. I’ll be doing my best to answer them here. Email them to steve@fosdal.net and be sure to include “TechTherapy” in the subject line.

Steve Fosdal – steve@fosdal.net

The opinions expressed here are my own. Any similarity the may have to another opinion, either living or dead, corporate or private, is purely coincidental and does not represent any form of endorsement or sponsorship.