Here is an email I sent out to everyone that, I swear, started off with just wanting to share a helpful link with them and keep Twitter in their minds:

This is an EXCELLENT resource for the newsroom and using Twitter to research, mobile tweeting, hashtags and more.

http://media.twitter.com/newsrooms

Some of you have Twitter accounts – even if you didn’t know it – and I have your login info and am available *anytime* you want to learn more about this important and really valuable tool. Come find me. And to those of you who don’t have an Indy Twitter account yet (like our awesome new photog), I’d be happy to get one set up for you.

Please consider learning more about Twitter and social media in general – I can sit with you one-on-one if you like. Lately, we are constantly getting scooped on Facebook and Twitter by other media outlets, and while I know it’s important to get the story for print, in today’s media, a breaking story is old by the time the reporter gets back in, writes the story and someone reads it before it’s posted online. Our readers are starting to turn elsewhere when something breaking happens.

Even just a quick tweet saying, ‘Accident at 281 and Webb – details online soon’ would help. We have to shift our thinking just a little bit if we’re going to stay relevant in the future. So that’s why I might seem a little aggressive in this email. I may go into nag mode until I get all of you using Twitter, even just a little

I hit ‘send’ before I could talk myself out of it and for the rest of the day, I went from frustration to elation when one of the reporters I believed was the least interested in social media approached me and told me that her concern wasn’t the technology – it was that she felt she didn’t have access to the technology. Blew. My. Mind.

It’s something I bemoan a lot here. I believe every reporter should be provided with a smartphone – or at the very least, access to a smartphone to take out in the field when needed. We managed to get a Droid that is used by our online reporter/videographer and he often tweets as @girightnow when he’s out. And that is fabulous and that is a LOT more than some small newsrooms get. But some of my journalists are using Razr phones with no texting plans. I mean seriously. Razrs. And while it’s awesome that we have our online guy, we also need our beat reporters to be more involved in tweeting.

So we gave the Droid to the reporter going to a board meeting today to see if she could manage a few tweets – so far she is rocking it and I am over the bloody moon. As I talked with my boss about this yesterday, I learned that we need to make sure the reporters will actually use the technology before we go out and splash a bunch of cash on it. We’ve been burned before (I’m looking at a dusty Zi8 video camera we bought in hopes of having the reporters grab it and go all the time) and so this time, we’re not going to get all excited and get ahead of ourselves until we’re sure they are on board.

The last thing I learned was that our paper’s Twitter/Facebook follower count has reached 1/5th of our print subscribers. That doesn’t include our “audience reach” of course, just the hard number of current subscribers, but that fraction also blew. my. mind.

I think we are finally past the “I don’t get it” stage or the “Who cares what they had for breakfast” stage. We’ve moved onto the “I need the technology first” stage. They get that Twitter and Facebook aren’t frivolous and unimportant. Now they just need to learn how to use them to their advantage.

Today I have two three reporters tweeting – one who had never done it before, and one who usually has trouble getting it to work for him. Today is a good day.

On with the list.

Tools I can’t live without:

Twitter. Obviously. Not only the service itself, but the huge assortment of third-party apps you can use with Twitter to really maximize its usefulness. Services like AudioBoo, Twitpic, Twitvid, and now Post.ly (which is quickly becoming my favorite) really make the Twitter experience – and the social experience – rich and satisfying.

I’ll break down these services:

AudioBoo: Simply the best option for posting brief audio clips online. Think of it as a micro-podcast. Uses include breaking news alerts, quick interviews, movie reviews, How-to tips (any kind of tips really), event coverage… the list goes on. Take a look at their Featured Boos to get a good idea of how folks are using it. The beauty of it is how easy they let you embed and share your Boos – if you can share or embed a YouTube video, you can share or embed a Boo.

You can Boo via their gorgeous iPhone app (it works just as well with an iPod Touch, but you’ll need Apple’s headphones/mic combo to do so.); You can upload or record a Boo right from your PC, and they now offer an app for the Droid as well (from reading the user reviews there, the app may need some tweaking still.) I love AudioBoo.

TwitPic: This service is a bit more subjective, depending on what you’ve got for a cell phone. Those of you with a spiffy smartphone have a lot of photo options such as YFrog or Tweetphoto. Personally, I hate YFrog because of its slow loading times, sometimes photos don’t load, and the site is too “busy” for my tastes.

For my part, I adore TwitPic. It works with any phone that takes photos, is as easy as emailing to a special address, and can handle large bandwidth loads well these days. I have a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone. I’d love a Droid or iPhone, but right now, both are cost-prohibitive for me. But, my little Virgin phone has served me well. I’ve used it extensively on vacations, for everyday ‘OMG look at all the snow!’ pictures, and I’ve done a little reporting for the paper with it.

Twitvid: I cannot get over how simple it has become to get video out there so quickly. Twitvid is just one of a number of excellent services out there, such as Qik and 12Seconds and Posterous (more on Posterous in a bit). Twitvid happens to be easiest for me to use because again, I don’t have a spiffy-cool smartphone. For those of you lucky people who do, Qik is awesome because you can also freaking STREAM VIDEO right from your phone. How cool is that?

But I use my trusty Flip Ultra, and upload to Twitvid as soon as I’m back at my computer and bingbangboom it’s uploaded and out there. The website allows you to post from your camera, from your phone, you can email it, or record from a webcam, and the ability to share the videos across multiple platforms is a plus.

Cover It Live: I cannot say enough wonderful things about Cover it Live. I’ve had so much fun with this amazing software for a long time now and tried many different ways to make it useful for my paper. It’s perfect for covering breaking stories, interviews, debates, live events (similar to radio doing ‘remotes’ on location), Q&A’s, and really just look at their site for more examples.

My newspaper’s owners require us to moderate the hell out of everything which can be a huge hindrance. But Cover It Live makes this dead easy without making people feel like they’re being moderated. The producer sees each comment before it ‘goes live’ and can choose whether or not to let it through. If a participant is trusted, the producer can allow them to comment unmoderated.

Cover It Live has so many features that will rock your socks. Feed in Twitter updates via user or hashtag, stream live video, you can drop ads in, upload photos into the chat, polls, a newsflash/scoreboard feature, replays, live editing (to fix all those pesky typos on the fly), and so much more. Here is the full feature list. Seriously, if I had to recommend one service (apart from Twitter ) it would be Cover it Live.

Posterous: This website is really amazing. As of today (January 21st, 2010) it has gotten even better with a new edition that I will talk about in just a moment. First, Posterous makes posting a blog, a video, an audio clip, or pictures so simple my grandmother could do it. Ok, maybe not my grandmother because she’s never touched a computer, but really, any technophobe would be able to handle this. All they need to know how to do is send an email with attachments.

That’s the beauty of Posterous. It magically takes your email attachments, be they audio, video or JPGs or just plain old text and turns them into slick blog posts which you can then share across a whole slew of popular platforms.

For a newsroom, Posterous is turning out to be an ideal way to gather user-generated content from your readers. By giving them a special email address associated with your paper’s Posterous site, readers can simply email you their bad weather/cutest puppy/sports photos and videos. You have full moderation control as well. The only drawback I have found with Posterous so far is that because it’s email, be prepared to deal with spam.

Today, Posterous announced the addition of Post.ly which lets you easily upload and tweet your multimedia stuff. Fantastico!

Facebook: Ahhh Facebook. Forget MySpace. Blech. A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. But for the purposes of a newspaper, it’s a good idea to be where your readers are no matter what the platform is.

Send your paper’s Twitter updates to Facebook. Let people share photos, videos, or links with you there. Join in on any comment threads that get started. Just like Twitter, the most important thing you can do is interact with your fans/friends/readers.

Don’t have anyone you can spare to manage your Social Media aspect for the paper? Spread it out among the staff. But this is important – don’t neglect it or ignore it if you don’t understand it. It will only hurt you in the end.

Tools that would rock in the newsroom:

A smartphone of some kind: I think every newsroom should equip their staff with an iPhone/Droid/Nexus. One of my coworkers just got a Droid (iPhones are not available in our area) and we’re both convinced that it is the single greatest tool a journalist could have.

As it is right now, I’ve got to carry my Flip, my cell phone and my iPod Touch which normally isn’t a big deal, but as I discovered on a vacation last year, juggling all of that while trying to capture a moment is hard. One phone to rule them all, I say!

Publish2: One of the best ways to collaborate with fellow journalists and aggregate links and stories for your readers. It’s a wonderful tool that I’m having trouble getting my newsroom interested in.

Just take a look at the sheer number of journalists you can collaborate with: P2 Directory

Some of the tools you get access to include a fabulous WordPress plugin, a browser bookmarklet to make sharing easier, widgets, and access to the Publish2 Ning network where you can bounce ideas, ask for help, share your own knowledge with so many journalists it’s not even funny.

Tools I wish I had access to:

iSites: Newspapers need to get on the ball with a decent smartphone app. I know the bigger newspapers have either paid a developer or have one in-house that can create gorgeous apps. I am jealous of them. But for smaller market papers who do not have that kind of budget, iSites feels like a decent solution. There are similar sites, such as DoApps.com, but after sifting through their blog I could find no pricing information whatsoever. That tells me it’s likely very expensive (and if not, why not post your pricing in a visible spot?)

iSites will create an iPhone  app, and beginning in early February according to their excellent live support person, a Droid app right away, and take care of the submission headaches for you. For a flat fee of $25, You get a lovely app fed by your RSS feeds. You can categorize by feed and if you wish to monetize it, you can pay a reasonable $99 per year fee and include AdMob in your App. I really like this solution and I’m hoping to get it approved for my newspaper.

Let me know in the comments what tools you love, what tools you wish you could use, and which ones would rock your newsroom!