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

For decades, the guru guide for news publication style has been “The Associated Press Stylebook” (full name: “The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law,” nickname: The AP Stylebook), a reference of 400 or so pages started in the early 1950s, expanded in the 1970s and updated sporadically thereafter.

Style, for our purposes, refers to the rules and customs of typography, spelling and word usage by a publication, and for legions of budding journalists the AP Stylebook has been essential reading and final-exam fodder on this subject. In my turn at journalism school, the dog-eared, spiral-bound Stylebook was tantamount to the periodic table in chemistry or a bible in divinity studies, and was ubiquitous in student book bags and next to IBM Selectrics.

Of course, style changes as times change and the AP rules we don’t practice every day can get lost in the murky depths of our distractions. Even seasoned pros are wont to thumb through the Stylebook’s pages or surf the online version — yes, there’s an app for that, too — to satisfy their finical needs, and the reader’s.

But who peruses the Stylebook like a novel to stay abreast of lost knowledge? As useful as the guide is, the pace plods, characters are lacking and the plot is rather thin. Better then to stay up to date on both old and new entries by taking refresher exams using Newsroom101.com‘s practice AP style quizzes. The quick and easy online test developed by Ron Hartung and Gerald Grow, is arranged alphabetically and with summary exercises at the end of each section. The entire series of quizzes contains about 450 items.

Hartung and Grow include a link to recent changes and annotations to the style guide, as well as refreshers on general grammar, punctuation, spelling, word usage and how to spot errors in news copy. The authors note that the quizzes are circa 2009, but an update with the latest style changes is pending.

David Sheets is a sports 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.

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.

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Emily Sweeney is a staff reporter at The Boston Globe. You can follow her on Twitter (@emilysweeney) and find her on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places.

Folks, allow me to introduce you to The Wayback Machine.

Now bookmark that site, because I guarantee you’ll want to go back.  Seriously. The Wayback Machine is an utterly amazing tool for investigative reporting. It’s basically a huge archive of old web pages that allows you turn back time and browse ze Internets like it’s Y2K….or 1998….or even 1996.

Just type in the URL of any website or page, hit enter, and you’ll be taken to an archived version of that website, so you can see what it looked like way back when.

A quick example: I recently visited The Wayback Machine and typed in www.spj.org – the website for the Society of Professional Journalists. A few moments later, the following list of dates popped up on my screen:

Those blue links are archived web pages that are available for viewing.

I clicked on the April 1997 link, and it brought me to the SPJ website….frozen in time, as it appeared over 13 years ago:

The Wayback Machine contains over 150 billion web pages, dating back to 1996. It’s great for doing research on companies, people, organizations….you name it. I’ve used it myself many times. Have you? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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Emily Sweeney is a staff reporter at The Boston Globe. You can follow her on Twitter (@emilysweeney) and find her on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places.

Looking for stock video footage? Try the Prelinger Archives.

It’s a HUGE collection of videos that are in the public domain. There are more than 2,000 titles on a dizzying array of topics:  Automobiles… Bananas… The Middle East… Minnesota… Thanksgiving… X-rays… Heck, they even have films about newspapers.

Most of the Prelinger videos are available  in several different formats (.AVI, MPEG-4, etc.) Just download the title of your choice, import the clip into your favorite editing program, and you’re good to go. The films are in the public domain, and free to use however you want.

“Any derivative works that you produce using these films are yours to perform, publish, reproduce, sell, or distribute in any way you wish without any limitations.”

If you do use their archived footage, they’d be happy if you credit Prelinger Archives and the Internet Archive – but it’s not required. (And keep in mind, Prelinger doesn’t provide written license agreements.  So proceed with caution.)

To go behind the scenes of the Prelinger Archives and see excerpts from more films, check out this video. Pure awesomeness.

I was working at a Dallas television station a few years ago when a manager sent out a memo to reporters telling us we had to start blogging. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. We didn’t get a book of rules or a “how to” book. We were just told, “start blogging.”

Now, three years later, I have two blogs and ideas for three more blogs.  On my Wise Latinas Linked blog, I write about members of my social networking group on Facebook and LinkedIn. On my Latino Communicators blog, I write about Hispanic “movers and shakers” in journalism and mass communications.

Whether you’re blogging as a requirement of your job or planning to have your own blog, there are several reasons why you should consider doing it.

Blogging is easy. It’s a way to start your journey in digital media. I also think it’s a great way to build on your journalism resume. Blogging is online work.

How To Start Your Blog

First, you need to find blogging software that is easy to use. There are several available. I use both WordPress.com and Blogger.com. They’re free and have step-by-step instructions on how to set up your blog. Both offer templates that are ready-made pages for your blog layout.

Who Are the Readers You Want To Attract?

You need to know which readers you want to reach with your blog. Once you know your target audience it will be much easier to come up with content. The blogs I have now are targeting women and/or Hispanics.

If you work for a media company, of course, your readers will be those devoted to your newspaper, television station or online site or — simply put — your fans.

Hundreds of journalists in the U.S. and around the world are blogging. Want to see if your blog will be unique? Just check out Blog Catalog’s list of journalist-bloggers. It’s a good site to surf for ideas.

Decide On Your Content

Some journalists write their own original content, but others find an interesting link, post it and add their two cents.  Linking to other sites is a good way to grow your readership.  I do both on my blogs.

If you’re one of those reporters required to blog for your company, your blog can just be an extension of your original story or the story of others who work with you.

Marian Wang is a reporter/blogger for Propublica.org. She tends to expand on stories published by other reporters on their site.

A blog can also be an opinion piece.  Got an opinion on an issue? That makes for an interesting blog.

This will probably be a little easier for a freelancer to take on.  If you’re an employee of a media company, you may have to get your bosses’ permission to go down the avenue of opinion blogging.

Neil McCartney is a photojournalist in Johannesburg. He blogs about his daily experiences as a photojournalist and shares his photos.

You can also take a completely different direction and blog about something other than news stories and journalism. Do you enjoy golfing?  Why not blog about golf courses you’ve visited or, maybe, interesting golfers?

Do you like visiting different museums around the country? Why not blog about your experience and your take on different museums?

Look, we’re journalists and we love to write, and we all have different interests.  Blogging is an easy way to start building on your digital media experience.

Blogging should not feel like a job.  It should feel like another way to express yourself through your words.

Rebecca Aguilar is the vice chairman of the SPJ Digital Media Committee.  She is an Emmy Award-winning freelance reporter based in Dallas, TX. Rebecca also sits on the Board of Directors with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.  Contact her at aguilar.thereporter@yahoo.com.

Plagiarism is an ugly word.  Have you ever wondered if you are a victim of web content theft? 

A few months ago, I happen to get on a new internet news site where contributors get paid by the click on their story.  I also happen to discover that a story posted by a babysitter-turn-news contributor actually was written by a reporter friend of mine who works for a major newspaper.

The woman who copied and pasted parts of my friend’s story did not credit him.  Sure she only took parts of his story, but it was taken word for word.    Why the news site managers didn’t look into this; that’s another story.   Of course, I told my reporter friend, and he took care of the rest.

At a social networking conference, I learned about a site called Copyscape.  It’s a free plagiarism checker.  Simple to use and right now appears to be the only web tool out there targeting plagiarism.

How does it work? Just put the URL in the search box that you want to check for plagiarism and submit.

Copyscape does the search for free.  It even offers a banner that you can put on your own website that warns people that you use Copyscape for checking.

If you want more bells and whistles you have to pay for it, but that includes a service that is constantly looking for your work for plagiarism and alerts you.

Copyscape has had several favorable reviews by major publications and internet news sites.  http://www.copyscape.com/press.php

Rebecca Aguilar is a freelance multimedia reporter based in Dallas.  She has 29 years of experience and has numerous awards for her work, including several Emmy awards.  She’s also on the board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.  Rebecca conducts reporting workshops around the country (Finding Sources and Stories, Networking, Live Shots, Getting the Best Interview, Writing to Video, and The Basics Of Multimedia.) She can be contacted at aguilar.thereporter@yahoo.com.