10 free and totally legal programs every multimedia journalist should have

While some of the top flight bits of kit: Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Studio and the like are still priced at hundreds of dollars, there are a growing number of cheaper or even free alternatives.

.01 MPEG Streamclip

What it does: Put simply, MPEG Streamclip is a video transcoder and compressor. It takes a video file and converts it into a smaller, bigger, different video file to suit your needs. I use it to compress the HD footage from my DSLR camera into a smaller high quality file so Final Cut Pro can handle it for editing.

Why you should have it: If you’re involved with the shooting or editing of video, MPEG Streamclip is a big problem solver. If you’ve got a film shot in .mov files, but one .avi file from another source, MPEG Streamclip will convert it. It’s also vital for making sure all your video uses the same codecs. You can also use it to resize footage.

How to get it: MPEG Streamclip is produced and published for free by Squared5. To download it for Mac or Windows, click here.

.02 GIMP

What it does: The comedy name stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program: it’s basically a powerful alternative to Adobe Photoshop, released under the GNU philosophy of free software ownership. It does practically everything Photoshop does.

Why you should have it: While, if I were a professional photojournalist, I would still get something all powerful, like Photoshop with Lightroom, GIMP is perfect for editing photos for the web, or for creating graphics. I use it to resize, manipulate and layer photographs for this blog, videos and the web; I also use it to design logos and layers for my Motion Graphics work.

How to get it: I don’t recommend Googling GIMP (who knows what you’ll find!); Instead click here to download GIMP 2.6, the latest release.

.03 Audacity

What it does: Audacity edits audio in lots of ways and is particularly effective for editing speech. It’s used in plenty of radio newsrooms around the world as an alternative to Adobe Audition. It allows for multilayered editing and lets you add plenty of professional filters to your audio.

Why you should have it: It’s useful as a simple converter (to turn a big .WAV file into a nice .mp3) but you’ll get more value from it if you’re editing podcasts or audio slideshows or using audio regularly in your work. It’s a bit tricky to get used to though, so give it time.

How to get it: It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is also released – for free – under the GNU licence. Click here to get a copy.

.04 FrameCounter

What it does: How many frames in a second? Well 24 usually (which is actually 23.98); or maybe it’s 30 (which is actually 29.97); unless of course you’re shooting at 60 frames per second. So how many frames in 15 seconds? Ummm… FrameCounter is a neat program from the Apple App Store which does the unpleasant maths for you.

Why you should have it: I’m crap at maths. That’s unfortunate when you shoot and edit video because there’s a fair bit of adding and subtraction to be done adding up frames. The Frame Counter’s a useful go-to tool for getting your sums right.

How to get it: Unfortunately this is only (as far as I know) available through Apple’s new App Store for computers.

.05 AudioHijackPro

What it does: Audio Hijack Pro solves that tricky problem of recording audio straight from your computer’s soundcard. For example, trying to record an interview on Skype usually requires feeding a cable from your headphone socket to a separate recorder. Audio Hijack Pro records whatever noise your computer makes and saves it as a file for editing. It does of course mean you could record licenced material (like music) straight from your computer, a flaky legal area.

Why you should have it: It’s useful for recording interviews or the audio from videos/live-streams.

How to get it: Audio Hijack Pro is produced and published by the hilariously named Rogue Amoeba. Click here to download a copy. The free version gives you 10 minutes of HQ recording, after which the sound quality starts to downgrade.

.06 Firebug

What it does: Firebug is a browser plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and others. Installing it lets you view and edit the HTML and CSS of any web page and get a live preview of how that edit might look. Fancy seeing how your favourite news website would look like in Comic Sans? Firebug shows you.

Why you should have it: Japes aside, Firebug is a fantastic tool for web designing. Say you’re creating a new online magazine: you’ve installed a WordPress theme and want to mess around with the look. You can use Firebug to test out different colours/fonts etc without affecting the stylesheet itself. You can also see how the code of a web page has been laid out.

How to get it: You’ll need a compatible browser, like Firefox or Chrome, but with that installed, just look for the relevant plugin directory and go from there!

.07 Wisestamp

What it does: Like Firebug, Wisestamp is a popular, free, plugin for advanced browsers. It creates a customisable email signature which you can attach at the bottom of your emails.

Why you should have it: Branding is increasingly important for many Next Generation Journalists, but how do you make your ‘brand’ standout among a sea of emails? Wisestamp lets you customise the colour, fonts and style of your signature and include a logo image. You can easily create social media buttons which link directly to your Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and WordPress feeds.

How to get it: You’ll need a compatible browser, like Firefox or Chrome, but with that installed, just look for the relevant plugin directory and go from there!

.08 Instapaper

What it does: Instapaper is an online storage for those websites you just don’t have time to read. A button in your browser lets you save the page in one-click and read them later.

Why you should have it: As a journalist working primarily online I surf through dozens and dozens of websites a day. Serendipity occasionally brings me to something unexpected and interesting, but not something I have time to read straight away. One click and I can save it til later. Instapaper lets you archive webpages in folders too, so you can store links relevant to specific stories you’re covering. I usually save an hour or so on a Sunday morning to have a look at my saved websites.

How to get it: Instapaper is accessible as a plugin to most browsers. Alternatively you can save a javascript link as a tab in your browser. Head to the Instapaper website for more.

.09 JDarkRoom

What it does: This is one of my favourite discoveries from the past year. It works to make your high powered computer, with all its buttons, dashboards, start menus look like one of those computers from the 1980s – you know, with the black screen and green text. Whatever you write is saved as a non-formatted text file.

Why you should have it: When I’m writing, I need to concentrate. That’s hard when you’re writing into a blog post, where the email tab is just a click away; or inside a word processor with countless distractions, like font size and colours. If you need to concentrate on the words alone, JDarkRoom clears everything else from your screen. The chunky green text is actually a very pleasant writing experience too. If you’re a writer your productivity will go up I promise!

How to get it: There’s a slightly better version called WriteRoom, which is available on a free trial and $24.99 afterwards; JDarkRoom however is completely free. It’s produced by the CodeAlchemists and you can click here to download.

.10 Quicktime

What it does: Why have I added Quicktime to this list? We all have it anyway right and it just plays .mov videos right? Wrong. Turns out Quicktime (on a Mac at least) is a bit more interesting than that. Did you know it can also record audio, video and even screencasts?

Why you should have it: You can use it to record footage from your webcam and Skype interviews. If you want to demo something on your computer, a screencast video is great.

How to get it: If you’ve got a Mac you should already have it. Again, a quick scout around the internet suggests this isn’t available for Windows users with quicktime. Sorry guys!

Read more here

You've Got Mail! Except When You Don't

AOL is overhauling its e-mail service, which is so out of vogue that a January disruption went largely unnoticed.

AOL, which was once the dominant e-mail provider in the U.S., is now the fourth-most popular service, according to comScore, with 25.2 million unique visitors in December 2010, trailing behind Yahoo! (93.9 million), Gmail (51.2 million), and Hotmail (45.7 million). The site continues to shrink. Since December 2009, AOL has suffered a 19.5 percent drop in unique visitors.

Read more at Business Week

The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy

The Web is not a uniformly positive force. The dissident who organizes on Facebook, for example, leaves behind a map for security forces to follow. The real question at the heart of 21st Century Statecraft is this: Is America remotely capable of using the Internet to direct events in its favor?

Activists in Tunisia organized on Face­book, and the country's now-deposed dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, saw the site as a threat; Al Jazeera has published evidence that the government had been using its domestic control of the Internet to pocket its citizens' Facebook passwords. Last year, however, Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian blogger and activist, questioned the support, through travel and training, that American foundations and companies had begun offering to local activists. He called it "the kiss of death" and wrote that it would erode local relevance and legitimacy, and would replace domestic ties among groups with bridges abroad. America's instinctive support for the right to speak and assemble can be hard to square with its need for stability. That's as true online as it is in the street.

One of Egypt's more popular Face­book protest groups, We Are All Khaled Said, (is) named for a young Egyptian allegedly killed by police in Alexandria last year. Before parliamentary elections in December, Face­book disabled the group. When asked to explain its decision, the company pointed out that the group's administrators were using pseudonyms, which can keep an activist safe but violates Face­book's terms of service. Face­book restored the group when a new administrator volunteered a real name.

The problem is not that Face­book bows to autocrats, but that it's not staffed up to fulfill its new accidental mission. People in crisis don't find new platforms; they reach out on the ones they have, the ones they already use to share pictures of babies and picnics. Face­book was designed for the pursuit of happiness; it's not vital despite its frivolity but because of it. Its decisions on so-called takedowns (removing a group or an account) follow an opaque process, with no consistent way to appeal for redress. The company often lacks even the language skills to make moral and political judgments in other countries. Nor does it offer basic constitutional protections such as habeas corpus or the right to face your accuser. Brett Solomon, the executive director of Access, a nonprofit that focuses on Internet freedom, suggests Facebook provide a "concierge service" for activists, a single point of access to help resolve tricky takedown issues. Google's (GOOG) YouTube, according to several activists, is already exemplary in this regard.

Read more at Business Week.

E-Books' Varied Formats Make Citations a Mess for Scholars

As e-reading devices gain popu­larity, professors and students are struggling to adapt them to an academic fun­damental: proper citations, which other scholars can use. The trouble is that in electronic formats, there are no fixed pages. The Kindle, developed by Amazon, does away with page numbers entirely. Along with other e-book readers, the Kindle allows users to change font style and size, so the number of words on a screen can vary. Instead of pages, it uses "location numbers" that relate to a specific part of a book. Other devices, like the Sony Reader, which reflows text based on font size and model of device, have different methods, so the same passage might have a different identifier. Things get more confusing when readers come in various screen sizes.

To provide guidance for the e-book world, the three major keepers of academic-citation style—the Modern Language Association's MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, the American Psychological Association, and the University of Chicago Press, publisher of The Chicago Manual of Style—have taken steps to answer the question of how to cite e-books. But many scholars are unaware of such guidelines, or find the new citation styles awkward.

Many scholars remain unaware that major guidebooks have added rules for e-books at all. "I don't think people have absorbed the fact that we have addressed the issue," says Carol F. Saller, senior manuscript editor and assistant managing editor of the books division at the Chi­cago Press.

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Web Words That Lure the Readers

Search engine optimization, or S.E.O. covers a wide range of behind-the-scenes tactics for getting search engine users to visit a Web site, like choosing story topics based on popular searches. Because Google is many Internet users’ front door to the Web, S.E.O. has become an obsession for many Web publishers, and successful ones use the strategies to varying degrees.

There is a whole industry of search engine optimization and social media experts, and many of them have found jobs at Web publishers. Their standard strategies include things like filling articles with keywords that people might search for, writing teaser headlines that people cannot help but click on and including copious links to other stories on the same site.

In addition to writing articles based on trending Google searches, The Huffington Post writes headlines like a popular one this week, “Watch: Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem.” It amasses often-searched phrases at the top of articles, like the 18 at the top of the one about Ms. Aguilera, including “Christina Aguilera National Anthem” and “Christina Aguilera Super Bowl.”

Though traditional print journalists might roll their eyes at picking topics based on Google searches, the articles can actually be useful for readers. The problem, analysts say, is when Web sites publish articles just to get clicks, without offering any real payoff for readers.

Read more at New York Times

National Spot Radio Rallied in 2010

National radio sales came surging back in 2010, according to Katz Radio Group, a national sales rep firm owned by Clear Channel Radio. Overall, national spot radio sales were up 17.7% in 2010 compared to 2009.

The Katz memo confirms earlier trends reported by the Radio Advertising Bureau, which identified national advertising as the top percentage growth area for radio, after digital. In the first nine months of 2010, total national ad sales increased 14% to $1.97 billion, according to the RAB, outpacing local -- long the mainstay of the radio business -- which edged up just 3% to $8.46 billion in the same period.

In dollar terms, that means national ad spending increased by about $242 million in the first nine months of 2010, per the RAB, compared to a $246 million increase for local ad spending.

Read more at Media Post

Hope for small bookstores?

As measured by numbers, bookstores are in inevitable decline, says Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a digital newsletter. At the same time, he says, some "modestly sized, locally connected independent stores have found a successful formula" for surviving in today's market.

A growing "buy local" movement across the country is helping all kinds of locally owned stores, says Oren Teicher, head of the American Booksellers Association, the independents' trade group.

Albert Greco, a Fordham University marketing professor who studies book retailing, says chain and independent stores "have never been under more pressure, and it's not all digital." Traditional bookstores (independents and the chains, including Books-A-Million) accounted for less than half of the book market last year, Greco says. The majority of books were sold by a variety of other retailers including Amazon, Price Clubs, supermarkets and convenience stores.

The long-term economic effect of a shift from print to digital on both publishers and booksellers isn't clear. But whether the shift is dramatic or more gradual, the number of bookstores is declining. More than 1,000 bookstores closed from 2000 through 2007, leaving about 10,600, according to the latest federal statistics.

Greco calculates that Amazon has 22.6% of the book market — ahead of Barnes & Noble (17.3%), Borders (8.1%), Books-A-Million (3%) and independents (6%).

Read more at the USA Today

"Journalism" With Robotic Automation

Carnegie Mellon research team specializing in human-computer interaction is conducting an experiment to see if they can create "an automated system for producing quality journalism using an army of untrained workers." Using the Amazon.com "Mechanical Turk" crowd-sourcing marketplace, the experiment, dubbed "My Boss Is A Robot," will attempt to produce a 500-word article on a newly-released scientific paper.

Entire editorial departments could be replaced by automated machines, with computer algorithms determining what's newsworthy and how the news should be packaged.

Read more here

Mag Circs Decline In 2nd Half Of '10

The second half of 2010 brought another round of declines in paid subscriptions and newsstand sales, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Between the second half of 2009 and the second half of 2010, the total paid subscription base of 572 titles tracked by ABC slipped 1.1%, from just over 266.4 million to just under 263.7 million. More ominously, single-copy sales (for those titles that provided them to ABC) slid 6.9% from almost 36.4 million to just below 33 million. Focusing in on the 125 largest titles, total paid subscriptions slipped 1.4% from 144.7 million to 142.8 million, while newsstand sales tumbled 7.2% from 25 million to 23.2 million.

Read more here

Arianna: Huge Expansion of Citizen Journalism

Arianna Huffington is planning to use AOL's infrastructure to launch a major expansion of citizen journalism in advance of the 2012 presidential campaign... in the wake of the merger with AOL. She plans to use AOL's Web site Patch.com, a network of sites that cover local news at the granular level, as a vehicle for expansion modeled on HuffingtonPost's 2008 "Off the Bus" coverage.

The expansion of citizen journalism seems likely to expand the current model by which a massive amount of content is generated by unpaid freelancers who are looking to get their voices heard.

Read more at the Washington Post

The Decline of E-Mail

The number of visitors to Web-based e-mail sites, like Gmail and Yahoo mail, declined 5.9 percent from November 2009 to November 2010, according to comScore, a firm that tracks Internet traffic. That decline reflects the spread of mobile e-mail devices like iPhones, which do not need to log onto the Web to see messages; the number of people who check e-mail almost daily on a mobile device rose 40 percent in the same period.

But comScore’s numbers also confirm that the youngest Internet users are abandoning e-mail. Twenty-four percent fewer people age 12 to 17 used Web-based e-mail in November 2010 than did in November 2009, even as the number of users 55 and over continued to rise.

Read more at the New York Times.

Crowdsourced Film

“Life in a Day”, a documentary compiled from footage sent to YouTube, celebrates a shared humanity... About 4,500 hours of footage taken on July 24th 2010 were submitted to the project as 80,000 clips from 190 countries. Some cameramen were seeking to provide insights into their lives or the lives of others, to impress the world of film or just have a bit of fun and the chance to win a ticket to the Sundance film festival—which agreed to show the finished project without any sense of how it might turn out.

Inevitably, the film-makers chose to focus on human universals: sleeping, waking, breaking fast, laughing, crying, talking and so on. Another part comes simply from finding the genuinely affecting: an American boy’s reluctance to be part of a family video project built around his mother’s fight with cancer; a Japanese widower’s morning routine in his messy apartment; a teenager’s mix of exhaustion, anxiety and hope.

Read more at The Economist

How Video Games Can Save the World

Good game designers know how to draw us in by catering to some very basic emotional needs. (Researcher Jane McGonigal) notes that the best games have four elements: clear goals that allow us to feel a sense of purpose; rules that make the task harder and thereby challenge our creativity; rapid feedback to chart our progress; and an experience that is voluntary.

Wouldn't it be nice if work was more like a video game? Your boss would articulate a clear mission and set of milestones you were expected to meet. You would go into the office every day and receive ongoing feedback about your progress so you could see the impact you are having.

The truth, of course, is that reality is messy. Our goals are fuzzy, our progress unclear. Video games, the majority of which now focus on getting us to cooperate rather than compete, offer a more fulfilling existence, McGonigal argues.

"We all want to find more meaning in what we do, like we're part of something bigger," McGonigal said. "Games give us a place to feel that, to cooperate and do something that is more satisfying."

There are plenty of reasons to still be wary about video games. We can't dismiss some of the concerns about desensitizing us to violence, or becoming too addictive. As a parent, I still struggle with how to teach my kids to explore video games in a responsible way.

"Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work," McGonigal writes. "They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales."

Stop and consider the astonishing amount of time that people are now spending on games. In the U.S. alone, there are 183 million active gamers out of a population just under 310 million. Each day in "World of Warcraft" alone, people spend more than 30 million hours playing. And that's just one game. If we redirected even a fraction of that time into making schools better, the result could be an epic win for all of us.

Read more at the San Jose Mercury News

Rupert Murdoch's Daily: Who needs paper?

On February 2nd Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched the Daily, an iPad newspaper that will cost 99 cents a week. The Daily is a mixture of the newfangled and the old-fashioned. It has whizzy graphics, including video and “360-degree” pictures. Sport fans can receive the twitterings of their favourite players. Unlike most websites, though, the Daily is only available in America. It features outmoded things such as editorials and paid reporters. Although it can be updated to take in breaking news, it is primarily a daily, not an hourly.

Read more at The Economist