It’s good to see that SPJ is embracing the new tools of digital media. Tumblr is an easy-to-use “microblog” that allows you to post quick links to content on the Web, or video, or photos, and share them with just a couple of clicks.

And followers (users “follow” Tumblrs) can easily share content to their networks — it’s a very socialized form of blogging.

Personally, I find Tumblr sometimes irritating because a lot of people use the platform to post stuff (like photos) with no captions, explanations, or plain ol’ context. But I use Tumblr myself, and now the SPJ, under the aegis of current prez John Ensslin, has launched a Tumblr where all the committee chairs can post content on the go.

Check out the Society of Professional Journalists’ Tumblr!

Lately, social media mavens have pinned their hopes on Pinterest as the next big thing in remote engagement because of the site’s stated goal to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”

Pinterest, its name an amalgamation of the words “pin” and “interest,” which you probably could have guessed, launched in 2009 and gained traction after its invitation-only wall came down in 2010 and prospective members were allowed to ask the site to join. Since then, Pinterest has garnered Facebook-level traffic, approaching 12 million new visitors a month.

The attraction: Pinterest is a picture-driven, digital cork board, a place for visual expression with themed “pin-up” boards where users can put up just about any digitized image or video they like. Member “followers” can also re-pin images and videos posted by others, thus trumpeting and spreading their interests and vision.

Certainly, Pinterest’s key attraction is its eye-candy appeal, but the site sports some versatility of a kind journalists may find useful. Among the ideas possible through Pinterest:

Breaking news and advancing stories — Journalists can pin on-scene images and video clips via iPhone to themed news boards, which can be linked to websites and other social media. Pinterest also works well as a place to post advances for upcoming news coverage.

Trend stories — Users have created themed boards on subjects ranging from fashion to pets to favorite jokes. The general topics are broad but Pinterest permits creation of narrowly focused boards. Even Pinterest’s traffic portends to trends — its chief demographic groups to date appear to be women, who make up about 58 percent of users, and people ages 25 to 44, who make up about 59 percent.

Storyboards — Pinterest’s boards can be rearranged, besides being customizable, so photographers, film editors and spot-news editors can organize their content into sequences that tell stories or send messages.

Portfolios and showcases — Pinterest can serve as a place to store, organize and display images for job applications, or as a storefront for selling those images. It’s also a good place to spotlight a publication’s best recent work.

Of course, everything that shows up online could show up on Pinterest regardless of whether anyone wants it pinned there, and this has stirred criticism that the site violates copyright law despite a “safe harbor” opening in that law. In the safe harbor, legal liability is limited or waived if a site either performs in “good faith” or adheres to agreed-upon standards.

Pinterest allegedly has received copyright challenges, but so far no one has pulled the pin in part because the site hasn’t taken egregious liberties with contributor content, like reselling it behind contributors’ backs. However, Pinterest seems to have found a way to turn re-pins into profit by modifying links to pins for commercial content, so that the pins link back to the image source. If the site has an affiliate-marketing program and Pinterest is part of it, then Pinterest profits from relinking to the affiliate, and the affiliate in turn gains a broader audience.

Pinterest has managed to avoid assessing fees, including sidebar ads, or allowing sponsored pins. But as Pinterest evolves, so too could its perception of fair use and right to reuse to pinned content unless members opt out, akin to Facebook. Prospective users should consider this before making Pinterest into a platform for their businesses.

Pinterest is a visual medium unlike any we’ve seen, but it’s still in a nascent state. Journalists should be careful: all the promise it holds has time yet to turn prickly.

David Sheets is a sports content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

This may be difficult for budding journalists to believe, but there was a time when shoe leather was a reporter’s best research tool.

Every pertinent document sat in a file viewable only in person, unless a dependable source slipped it in the mail as a favor. And news editors were suspicious of journalists who spent too much time on the phone or loitering in the news room; they believed gathering news meant getting out of the office and returning only when it was time to write.

Of course, it’s still a good idea to go where the news is; however, a majority of the document searches formerly conducted by rooting through a dusty filing cabinet somewhere can be done at reporters’ desks — or if they’re truly savvy, on their smart phones.

But where to start? The Web has a wealth of valuable digital data tangled in it, yet the extent of that data is daunting. Thus, new and veteran journalists alike look at the lot of it, their eyes glaze, their palms turn sweaty and potentially good stories are bypassed for easier fare, all because the Internet intimidated them.

Relax. Just like building a house starts with a plan, so too does digital research. Once the seed of a story idea becomes clear, reporters need to settle on a strategy for making it grow: figure out what questions must be asked and where to go for answers.

For help with answers when researching people, try these websites:

* Naturally, start with Google. The “advanced search” feature can be particularly useful. But don’t forget other engines such as Bing, Dogpile, Twingine and Yahoo. Also, the site Zoominfo pairs people with their relationship to businesses.

* Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter of course are great for examining a person’s online presence. Other interactivity monitors are 123people, Icerocket, Pipl, Samepoint and WhosTalkin.

* BirthDatabase matches people by birth date.

* Zabasearch is a free people-finder searchable by name and phone number. For a fee, the site also will run a background check on a person. Another site, WhitePages, also searches by phone number.

* Portico compiles numerous websites containing public information. It’s a good place for quick link searches on such subjects as real estate holdings, aircraft and boat registrations, even horse ownership. Additionally, BRB Publications lists links to public records by state and by county. And Coordinated Legal Technologies can help trace a person’s corporate trail.

* For court records and criminal information, try the National Center for State Courts the pay sitePACER, the national sex-offender registry, and the criminal history site CriminalSearches.

David Sheets is a sports content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

As we near the SPJ convention in New Orleans; it’s a good time to remind you of all the digital media tools we have written about in the past year.   Just in case you’ve missed some of our past blogs, here is a list of topics we’ve covered.  

How to use Facebook in Journalism

Making Maps with UMappter 

Social media marketing tools for journalists

Getting started with quick, easy data visualization

Data Visualization and Infographic Sites to Bookmark

Build your website for free

Tablet or laptop? For some of us, the choice is obvious

Streamling your social media posting

Quora tries to answer all your questions

How to participate in a Twitter chat

Using Windows Movie Maker to edit audio clips

Google Charts Part 2 of 2: Motion charts

CuePrompter: No more memorizing scripts for your video blog

Digital media skills every young journalist needs 

Tools that help you get more from Twitter

Rebecca Aguilar is an Emmy award winning freelance reporter in Dallas, TX. She is the vice chairman of the SPJ Digital Media Committee, and a board member with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Fort Worth Chapter of SPJ.  She has 30 years of experience: television news, online news and video producing.  She can be contacted at aguilar.thereporter@yahoo.com

Charts, fever lines, maps and diagrams: They aren’t just for the Graphics Department anymore.

There once was a time when reporters dealt with words and someone else dealt with the numbers and the pictures. But not anymore. There are plenty of free, easy tools now to get any journalist, regardless of their word-centricity, started on data visualization all by themselves.

That means you can do you can do your own quick and easy data visualizations to go with your own online stories or blog posts.

My Digital Media Committee colleague Jodie Mozdzer, who is working on her masters in news infographics, recently blogged for us on some handy Web sites you can use to learn more about data visualization. With Jodie’s gracious permission, I’d like to pick up that thread and add some more.

If your newsroom is a small shop like mine, doing your own data visualizations is great because you don’t need your own dedicated graphics staff to turn out a professional-looking pie chart or fever chart. If you’re in a larger newsroom with its own graphics department, your (probably overworked) graphics staff may not be in a position to crank out a fever chart every time you want to do a quickie blog post about the new revenue projection numbers from the city finance department. But you can do a simple visualization all by yourself.

But this isn’t just about generating pictures to dress up your blog posts. As a reporter, doing your own simple data visualizations using free tools — especially earn on in the reporting process — allows you to spot interesting trends that you might not always see easily just by reviewing a spreadsheet full of numbers.

And, best of all, it prevents the situation that one former newspaper graphics guy complained to me about recently: The moment when a graphics guy/gal realizes that the reporter who’s writing a spot story about tax revenue projections going up has just handed over a spreadsheet of numbers that, when plotted on a chart, show the projections actually going down.

With free data visualization tools, reporters can draw their own quick-and-dirty graphics and make sure the squiggly lines really are going up, up, up, and not down, down, down before they make 17 phone calls asking the city council how the city should spend all that extra tax money.

We’re going to talk mostly about free, browser-based tools today.

For basic charts, fever lines, stock-price-type charts and old-fashioned pie charts, go to Google Docs. You’ll only need a free Google or Gmail account. Go into the Google Docs spreadsheet and type in or import your data.

Then, go to the icon in the toolbar that looks like miniature bar chart showing, say, your state budget’s spending on highway pothole repairs. Hit that button, and it’ll walk you through the steps of creating a chart with a custom title. You can then save that chart as a .jpg or .png image file and place it in your Web story or blog post like you would any other image you would use in your CMS. (Microsoft Excel will also create nice charts and has more customization features for charts than does Google Docs, so if you have Excel and know how to use it, you can try Excel. However, my older version of Excel won’t let me export a chart as a separate image file, so I use Google Docs anyhow.)

To compare the size of different things — relative size — try making a “bubble chart” using IBM’s free ManyEyes site. This generates a graphic that I see in the New York Times probably more than any other major news outlet site, one that looks like you’re looking at a glass jar full of marbles, with little marbles of various size and big “shooter” marbles mixed in. (For those of you who also read the SPJ Generation J blog: “Marbles” was a game children used to play before they invented Nintendo.)

Here’s an example: A ManyEyes visualization of the fates of chihauhuas brought in to a California animal shelter. Like Google Docs, ManyEyes allows you to save your graphic as an image file and then upload it to your CMS, which enables me to plop this chart right down in the middle of this post. (What is going on with the seven chihuahuas that escaped, by the way?)

But notice one thing: The data shown here regarding chihuahuas could also work just as well as a pie chart. I mean, we’re talking about one finite set of numbers — all the chihuahuas brought into a certain shelter in a certain year. So, the most crucial aspect to be visualized is what proportion of the whole wound up being adopted out, euthanized, escaped, etc. And that’s what pie charts generally show, proportions of the whole.

Let’s imagine a bubble chart that shows something that you couldn’t show with a pie chart. Say you wanted to show the amounts of emergency preparedness spending in the current fiscal year budgets for all the cities in your MSA.

You can’t show that very well in a pie chart, can you? I mean, there’s more than one pie, because there’s more than one city involved. But the size of the bubbles in the chart will help people see the sizes of the emergency preparedness budgets relative to one another.

Scatterplot charts: I’ll be honest with you: There’s something about scatterplot charts that makes my head hurt. If you’re really needing to use a scatterplot chart, you’re probably an education reporter (or a former ed reporter having a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback to your last statewide standardized testing data-dump day). A statistically minded friend of mine tried to tell me not long ago that scatterplot charts are just fever charts with a really fuzzy fever line, which makes more sense to me than any other explanation I’ve ever heard. But if you’re in need of a scatterplot chart, ask yourself, “Am I still an education reporter?” If the answer is yes, both Google Docs spreadsheets and Google Fusion Tables will create scatterplot charts. If the answer is no, you probably do not need a scatterplot chart. You just need a stiff drink.

Wordles: We’ve all seen a Wordle: A computer program takes all the words in a given piece of text, analyzes them and diagrams which ones were repeated most often. This may not count as the purest form of “data” to visualize, but can sometimes be kind of entertaining, such as when people have dumped the text of gubernatorial “state of the state” speeches into the computer brain. You can also try some variants of Wordles like word trees through ManyEyes.

Maps: So much of what we do as journalists involves not just data but data tied to geography, which means creating maps is a good way to do data visualization — but there are several ways to make maps depending on just what you’re trying to show.

The simplest way to do a map online — a map showing one dot on it — is with Google Maps’ My Maps function. Are you the 6 a.m. cop shift reporter at your shop who’s assigned to update your home page with breaking news, and you get a report that an F-4 tornado has just destroyed all of downtown Snodgrass, Okla., including the World’s Largest Upright Vacuum Cleaner, which had been housed at the National Museum of Vacuums and Cleaning Appliances in Snodgrass, and you need to quickly get a map up online showing the location of Snodgrass? Go to Google Maps, search for Snodgrass, Okla., hit the “link” button in the upper-right corner to grab the embed code, and plop that code in your Web story.

Multiple points on a map: But it’s much easier to understand the power of maps when you see how easy it is to plot multiple pieces of information on a map. Back a few months ago, the school system here in Houston was considering closing some “small” schools — schools with the fewest students, said to be less-than-economical to operate — to save money. A colleague of mine mapped the location of all 60-plus schools that were in play for closure using another free site called Geocommons, which allows you to upload a data file of many map points and customize the information window text for each point. (You can see her map below.) You’ll first need to add a column to your data file that includes the latitude and longitude for each point (each school, in this case), and if you have a relatively small number of points, you can do that for free using sites like Batch Geocode. Geocommons is free and its maps are easily embeddable.

You can also map multiple points using Google Fusion Tables, which has the added benefit of built-in geocoding (to “geocode” something is to find the lat-long coordinates for it). A nonprofit online news site in North Carolina used Fusion Tables to produce a super-cool map of damage by a recent tornado in the Raleigh area, for instance (at right). Again, free and embeddable.

You can get as creative as you want with tricking out the info window text in these custom maps. Here’s a map I did a couple of years ago where we took just about all the information we could find online for all 181 Texas legislators and married it all to a Google Map. Yes, it did take a long time to pull all this together, but with the incredible improvements recently in services like Google Fusion Tables and Geocommons, it’s a lot easier to do a map like this today than it was when I did it in ‘09.

Lines or routes on a map: Need to show the six different cities the governor flew to on state aircraft to rendezvous with his mistress? Go to Google Maps and plot each trip using colored lines for each of the flights using the crooked line tool in the upper-left corner of the map window. Then save the map, grab the embed code and embed that sucker in your blog post or story.

Maps with shapes on them: Sometimes it’s not enough to show a point on a map, or even a line. You need to show the boundary of a county or the proposed lines for newly redrawn legislative districts or the jurisdiction of a municipal utility district.

The map people call these shapes  “polygons,” a word most of us haven’t used since high school geometry class, and it used to be, you’d need $2,500 worth of software like ArcGIS to do stuff like that.

Not anymore. Geocommons and Google Fusion Tables will both allow you to upload GIS “shapefiles” of city, county and other government boundaries — and you can often download those files directly from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site or get them from your local planning department. Just upload your map boundaries and tell it what color scheme to use. Here’s one I made not long ago that shows Houston’s 88 “superneighborhoods,” as defined by the city.

Comparing geographic areas: Need to show the difference in per capita incomes in each county in your MSA or state? I’ve always called these “heat maps” though I think the formal name is “chloropleth map.” Just like Geocommons and Google Fusion Tables will both let you upload shapefiles, they will also enable you to shade the polygons to show data characterisitics for those areas — the redder the red, the higher the per capita income in that county, for instance. Or, the bluer the blue, the more kids living in that Census tract who live at or below the poverty line. Just upload your map boundaries, upload your data, and tell it what color scheme to use. Here’s one (below) from ManyEyes, showing the number of youth homicides in the states of Brazil.

Again, not only is this a good way for readers to take in a whole lot of information easily, it’s a good way for you as a reporter to quickly spot trends that could make good stories. For instance, here’s a map (below) plotting county-by-county Census data. For instance, notice the counties with the high numbers of small kids in, say, several counties in Utah. Why? Might make a good story. In the very southernmost tip of Texas? What’s up with that? And a baby boom in western South Dakota?

Before I sign off, let me add to Jodie’s list of good sites to bookmark if you want to see cool data visualizations. My Facebook friend and former competitor Matt Stiles, late of the Texas Tribune but now of NPR, has a Tumblr blog on data visualization called the Daily Viz. I found the Census data map through his site, so check it out.

Jennifer Peebles is a deputy editor at Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit online news site based in Houston, and is chairman of the SPJ Digital Media Committee. A truncated version of this blog post appeared in the most recent issue of SPJ’s Quill magazine. Contact her at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org, 281-656-1681 or on Twitter at @jpeebles or @texaswatchdog.

More journalists these days are setting up their own websites where they can profile their work. It’s one of the best ways to grow your brand and display your resume online.

I’ve taken web design classes for four years, and I must admit sometimes I get lost in all the language: CSS, HTML, PHP, HTML5, Flash and the list goes on.  I’m fortunate, because as a freelance reporter I’ve had time to take classes.

But if you don’t have time to learn how to build your own website from scratch or can’t afford  to get one designed; here are a three free website builders  Each of these companies will also host your website for free if you don’t mind the long url  (example: http://www.wix.com/rebeccaaguilar/aguilar-the-reporter ). 

I set up sample websites at Wix, WebStarts and Moonfruit.    It was very easy and fast.  I think the end results look very professional at all three sites.  Check out my Wix sample website.   Each free website builder offers:

• Templates designs for your website
• Text editors
• Variety of font choices
• Drag and drop tools for images
• Video embed tools
• Video tutorials to help you use the site

Wix.com

WebStarts.com

Moonfruit.com

Each company offers a “premium” package,  if you want to buy more tools to use on your website.  In my opinion, what they each have to offer for free is good enough if you need the basics.   You also have the option of paying to get it hosted by the hosting company of your choice.  Now go out there and get yourself a website!

Rebecca Aguilar is an Emmy award winning freelance reporter in Dallas, TX. She is the vice chairman of the SPJ Digital Media Committee, and a board member with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She has 30 years of experience: television news, online news and video producing.  She can be contacted at aguilar.thereporter@yahoo.com

Funnel

Social media can help you in your reporting, help you get out the word about your stories and help you build own brand as a journalist.

But there are so many social media and social networking sites these days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed — like there are too many to update on a regular basis.

In many cases, it’s possible to update more than one social media site or service at a time with a single post using some tools we’ll talk about today. They might make your life easier in navigating social media.

Facebook Connect: This is the simplest way to update two services at once. On a lot of major social media sites today, you’ll be given an option to log in using your Facebook account. In some cases, doing this will publish your posts or updates on that service to your Facebook page as well.

For instance, I just told StumbleUpon that I liked a recent story in the Texas Observer. I have my StumbleUpon account linked to my Facebook account, and I have given SU permission to post the things I like on SU to my Facebook wall, so now my Facebook friends can see that I have shared the Observer story with them.

Ping.fm: This is a free service that lets you “ping” multiple social networking services at once with a single post or an update. Ping currently works with more than 30 services, including Twitter, Facebook (personal Facebook accounts and what used to be called Facebook “fan” pages), Delicious, Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger.

To use it, start by going to the Ping.fm site and registering for a free account. From there, pick the social media services you want Ping to be able to post to, and then you’ll be asked to enter your usernames/passwords for those accounts. (Important note: It’s possible to rig up these other services and later turn them off and on as desired.)

After it’s set up, you use it by going back to Ping.fm’s site and typing your update in the status box. When you update it, the message is pinged off to the other recipient sites and posts on your accounts there.

At Texas Watchdog, the nonprofit news site I work for in Houston, we use Ping.fm a great deal, though I usually post to it through the Twhirl Twitter client using a Ping app key. It allows our @TexasWatchdog tweets to go directly to our texaswatchdog account on Delicious (most of our tweets are about links to stories we think are cool), among other things.

For a time, we experimented with having Ping.fm send all of our tweets to our Facebook page wall, but that didn’t work for our purposes — when we began live-tweeting the local school board meetings, we found we were drowning our Facebook fans in status updates. We wound up disconnecting our Facebook page from Ping and using an alternative that I’ll talk more about in a minute. But Ping-to-Facebook might work very well for your purposes if you don’t firehose those tweets. (I’m currently using my it, and my own Ping app key, to post my @jpeebles tweets to my personal Facebook wall and to update my status on the Wired Journalists Ning, for instance.)

You can also set up your Ping account so that you can send out pings/tweets via SMS, or send out RSS feed blurbs or items you’re sharing on Google Reader.

HootSuite, Seesmic and the “social media dashboards”: These are services that integrate a Twitter client — often with tweets grouped into columns — with a Ping-like capability to send those same messages to Twitter and a slew of other social media services at once. Some of them also offer other services like contact management and analytics and useful helpers like built-in link shorteners.

I’m a HootSuite user, so I’ll focus on it. HootSuite has a couple of things going for it that Ping.fm doesn’t. For one thing, HootSuite gives you the capability to schedule your tweets in advance. That gives you the ability to space out your tweets over the course of a day or a week.

Once I caught on to HootSuite, I was able to stop sending out 18 tweets within an hour-long period each morning for all the cool stories that had popped up in my Google Reader overnight — instead, I could schedule those tweets ahead of time to space them out over a day so that our followers didn’t get deluged with @texaswatchdog tweets from us each morning.

HootSuite also gives you an easy method to pick which services you want each individual message to go out to. Just click the ones you want to broadcast that tweet on and hit the submit button — HootSuite’s process for this is much easier than Ping.fm’s method of turning services off and on.

When I’m using HootSuite to tweet as @texaswatchdog, I usually send out messages only to Twitter, but it gives me the option of also sending each message to our Facebook page as well — we do that only occassionally, but there are some times when it’s nice to have that option.

On the other hand, Ping.fm has some things going for it that HootSuite doesn’t.  Ping.fm is totally free, as far as I can tell, and can work with dozens of services. HootSuite is mostly free, but you can only bring in up to five social media profiles under the free plan. To rig up more than that, you have to pay. Paid users can also have other “team members” posting to the same accounts, which might be handy if you have a slew of people in your office taking turns tweeting as @YourPublicationNameHere. (Just don’t let anything like this happen. Or this.)

Custom tabs on Facebook pages: Another method for bringing in material to your Facebook page followers is to use Facebook applications to create custom tabs on your Facebook page and funnel content from your other social media services on to those tabs.

For instance, we have all of our @texaswatchdog Twitter stream flowing onto a Twitter tab on our Facebook page thanks to a free app from the folks at Involver. You can find other FB apps that will create a Twitter tab, but some of them will want you to pay for it. Involver gives away some of its FB apps for free, and we’ve been very happy with using their tabs — our Facebook fans can still easily access our Twitter content regardless of whether they’re on Twitter or not, but the use of the tab means the tweets aren’t smothering our Facebook followers and cluttering up their FB news feeds. (For some more examples of people who successfully use Involver tabs on their Facebook page, check out the Texas Observer, which has a “blogs” tab that easily takes readers to any of several Observer blogs.) A second Involver-based tab brings our Facebook readers our recently liked content from YouTube, and in the past, we’ve used a custom tab for the Livestream service to also offer up our free monthly Webinar on open government.

Automatically import your site’s RSS feed into your Facebook page: Facebook has a built-in tools to do this — they’re free and pretty easy to use, and they can import the feed items to either the Wall or to FB Notes — but in my experience, Facebook’s tools are a bit flawed. I manage blogs and Facebook pages for a handful of journalism organizations I work with, and sometimes it can take three or four days for a new blog post to show up automatically on that group’s Facebook page. Other times, it may take only a few hours. I’m not sure what’s going on there, so I mention this with some hesitation. Instead, I would try some of the third-party Facebook apps that have been developed for this purpose, such as Social RSS or Involver’s free RSS app.

A word about the social bookmarking sites that basically offer link popularity contests, like Digg, Reddit, and, to some degree, StumbleUpon: It would be really efficient for us as journalists if there were a way to automate sending our fresh content to these sites, either through Ping.fm or some other conduit, but quite frankly, I have never figured out a way to do this. I’m not entirely sure it can be done — I really don’t think the people who run those sites, or the user communities on those sites, would want folks to be able to funnel even more potentially spam-driven or otherwise self-promoting content onto their screens.

I think they want to make it so that there’s some effort involved in submitting a link to their site, because that weeds out some of the people who aren’t serious about offering up good content. Granted, it doesn’t always work — maybe it’s just me, but for some reason, I always get what seems like an inordinate amount of “dugg” links for sites like MyAwesomeGutterRepair.com when I’m searching for content on Digg. But certainly those communities don’t want to make it easier for MyAwesomeGutterRepair and MyAwesomeDrivewaySealing to post even more junk there. (But if you know of a way to make it easier to post to these sites, by all means, please share in the comments below.)

These aren’t the only ways to combine the elements of your social-media-posting routine. I know there are others I’m forgetting, and still others I’ve not even familiar with. So, how do you manage your social media?

Jennifer Peebles is deputy editor at Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit online-only news site based in Houston. Contact her at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or follow her on Twitter at @jpeebles or @texaswatchdog.

Funnel photo by flickr user El Bibliomata, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sometimes television reporters make it look so easy when they’re out in the field doing a “live shot.” I know after 27 years in television—it took practice, practice, practice to make a live shot flawless.

I was always concerned that I would say “um, um, and um” too many times, or maybe lose my train of thought. I always thought news anchors had it so easy, because they had a teleprompter for their scripts.

Some of you may be video blogging and are trying to figure out how to make it look natural when you’re on camera recording your report.

Well I found this piece of free webware called CuePrompter. It’s an online teleprompter. It’s amazing because once you get the hang of using it, you’re going look and sound like all those television anchors you see on the nightly news.

All you need is your script, copy and paste into your computer and CuePrompter does the rest for you.

CBT Café produced this excellent video on how to use CuePrompter.

It’s free and easy to use, and more than anything no more fumbling or stumbling or even memorizing your script. Now you’re going to look flawless on camera.

Watch out Katie Couric and Brian Williams—here we come!

Rebecca Aguilar is an Emmy award winning reporter with 29 years of experience. Most of her years have been in television news, but now she is a multimedia freelance reporter based in Dallas, Texas. She is currently a board member with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

When you run into a problem, sometimes the solution you’re looking for is right under your nose and you don’t know it.

And so I came to learn how to use Windows Movie Maker to edit audio for my podcast. And now, I’m going to show you how to do the same.

My problem was editing audio clips of interviews taped with my digital voice recorder — the fact that I still call it a “digital tape recorder” probably gives away my age.

I have an Olympus-brand recorder (my second Olympus-brand recorder), and it allows the user to plug the recorder into a PC through a USB connection and download the audio recordings from it as Windows Media Audio (.wma) files.

So, when I recently launched a podcast/live Internet radio talk show on open government issues through BlogTalkRadio.com, I thought I could pre-record telephone interviews with my guests and then use free Audacity software to edit it down.

Or so I thought. But when the time came — two days before my second show aired — to edit the audio, I found out the hard way that Audacity, as awesome as it is, will not edit .wma-format audio.

I thought about trying to convert the audio from .wma to a format Audacity does edit, like .mp3 or .wav, but I didn’t want to pay for yet another conversion program that turns out not to work — been there, done that. Is there no program anywhere that edits .wma?

There is. And it was on my computer the whole time: Windows Movie Maker.

My friend and colleague Emily Sweeney has already posted a primer on how to use Windows Movie Maker to edit video clips. But it will also edit audio-only files, too.

Here’s how to do it:

First, download the audio file from your digital voice recorder.

Now, open up Windows Movie Maker. In the upper-left corner, hit “import media” and pick out the .wma file you want to edit.

When it imports, look at the timeline down at the bottom of the screen. You’ll see that your .wma file shows up in the “audio/music” track in the timeline, showing you a waveform pattern for the sound — big hills represent lots of noise, the valleys are the silent parts on the audio track. (Don’t be bothered by the fact that there’s nothing in the “video” track of the timeline.)

Now, you can edit the audio track the same way you would edit a video clip in Movie Maker. Use the “play” and “rewind” buttons on the timeline to manuever the green time bar to the points in the audio track where you want to make cuts. Use the “split” function to make a cut where the green bar is standing. To cut out a section, make a cut on each end of the section you want to excise, then put the cursor on that section, right click and pull down to “remove.” (You can also hit the “delete” key with that section selected.)

Once you’ve got it edited the way you want it, you’re ready to make the program spit out the edited-down audio as a .wma file. So go up to “publish movie.”

It will ask, “where do you want to publish your movie?” Pick “This computer” and hit “next.”

Now, give the edited file a name and tell it what folder to place the finished file in. Next, it’ll ask you for some setting information — I usually don’t change any of these — and you can hit “publish.”

And when it’s done, you’re done. You’ve got an edited .wma file ready for podcasting or uploading to the Web for whatever purpose.

Jennifer Peebles is chairman of SPJ’s Digital Media Committee and is deputy editor of Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit online news site based in Houston. Contact her at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or follow her on Twitter at @jpeebles and @texaswatchdog. And if you’re into FOI and open government, her Internet radio show/podcast airs Tuesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Central.