But one of the reasons I justified spending some hard-earned dosh on it was that I hoped it could potentially be useful at work. My publisher has been talking about trying to get a couple for the newsroom and for advertising and so I thought, if I have one and bring it to work with me everyday, it’s usefulness would become apparent.

So far it’s great at telling me the weather. And testing site designs and how they look on it. I’ve been able to show it off a little and everyone agrees it’s a pretty gorgeous little machine, but so many keep referring to it as ‘Steph’s toy.’

At home, yes it’s been something of a toy while I play Plants vs. Zombies on it or watch some Doctor Who on Netflix while I’m on the treadmill, and my goodness, AirPlay is a brilliant app. But here’s a few ideas I have for making this more of a tool at work as opposed to a toy:

• Our mobile web reporter could use it to make submitting stories on the road easier than typing it out on the Droid.
• Any reporter attending city council or school board meetings can take notes easily without lugging a laptop in and with a 3G iPad, no need to worry about available wifi.
• Ad reps can eliminate the need for paper-wasting flyers and packets by keeping various presentations on the iPad to show advertisers.
• Online demos and ad banner prototypes can be shown easily and impressively.

I would love to hear from other newsrooms out there that are either using iPads or thinking about it to find out how they’re being used or to get more ideas on how to use them. Comments are open- Russian spammers piss off please, I’m sick of you.

- written with the WordPress iPad app which is really awesome

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!

1. Liveblogged. I opened up a Cover it Live session for readers to come in and talk about the election. Traffic was steady, and naturally, it really picked up when results began coming in. It was also quite a little test for me to work on keeping my mouth shut because as you can imagine, political discussions can get… heated. I never really talk about my personal views anyway, but I do have them. And keeping the conversation flowing was sometimes difficult to do when I couldn’t “weigh in” myself. Thankfully, we had enough people in it throughout the day that this didn’t happen to me too often.

2. We use Zope right now to publish our website and it’s kind of limiting on what you can do to make something the focus on the front page. I’m sorry lovely, talented GateHouse peeps but Zope just sucks. I feel very stifled with it. We needed a way to update election results quickly and because I had to do them manually, I wanted to have one place to put them. I could have continually updated a Zope story, but it’s just too clunky on the back end.

So our presentation editor created a nice graphic for one Zope story to be the featured story. In the subhead area, we put links to the liveblog (which could also be found by clicking into the Zope story), a link to votenebraska08.com (WordPress blog) which is where I put everything election-related I could think of and would also use for posting results, and I put a Twitter widget up for @theindependent so it was visible on the front page as well.

3. Tweeted throughout the day, and when I started in on posting the results, I would tweet the link to new updates on the votenebraska08 blog. I went this route because I couldn’t get any rss feeds or widgets to work with Zope apart from the Twitter widget. Still no idea why.

I used a lot of widgets on the blog like the Twitter election map, and MSNBC’s election widgets as well as Yahoo Pipes to pull in our own local stories as they were posted (the newsroom ‘Zoped’ stories throughout the evening.)

I was pasting results from the state results site, but man, that was tedious, so I just iframed the page into the blog. I know, iframe – but I was doing a lot of this on the fly and in the midst of a flurry of election results coming in.

My goal was to have one place for our readers to come to get results. Sure they could have gone to the county election commissioner’s office and the state websites to check, but that’s a lot of travelling around the web, refreshing pages over and over. I wanted them to come to the votenebraska blog to get everything they needed, and I used the liveblog to get them to tell me what they wanted to see.

For instance, one person came in and complained that we had no results up for other counties. They maybe could have been a little more polite about it, but I did discover that those results were just sitting in agate on our internal newsroom server and no one put them on the web. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t needed to investigate. So I was able to clean them up and post them to the blog and appease this reader.

So that’s it really. We had great traffic (relatively speaking, I mean we’re a mid-size paper) to the blog and in the liveblog and got some wonderful feedback on Twitter:

Liveblog:
Total Unique Readers who pressed ‘Watch Now’: 376
Total Unique Readers who watched for over 1 minute: 289

Published Entries:
Writer Comments Published: 393
Reader Comments Published: 1014

Votenebraska08.com Stats:
1,917 pageviews in less than 24 hours.

Tweetback:
From: @mrbalcom – Thanks for all the hard work today and this evening. We want you to know how appreciated it is! Great job!!

That makes all the craziness worth it.

I’ve had a Twitter account set up for The Independent for some time now, and it’s been slow, but we’re getting followers now. I set up a feed to post latest headlines to it and I left it alone. I love stuff that runs itself. But now that our Twittership is growing, I want to bring it into the newsroom and have our reporters do a little microblogging. I’ve been using it every so often to pimp some promotions (not too often though, don’t want to get spammy) and now I’ve got a new account set up to promote a music tournament the paper is doing, where I will be tweeting music trivia and tidbits, as well as news about the tourney.

The Twitter thing seems to be taking off here in Nebraska as I just participated in a Q&A with the Nebraska Press Association who was curious about the use of tools like this. I hope it takes off around here. I noticed some of the local TV stations are on the Twitter bandwagon so that’s a good sign. I’ve gotten great feedback from readers about it as well.

And Cover It Live. How I love this tool. I want to take it out for dinner, it’s so cool. I’ll even pay. We’ll be using it again during the previously mentioned music tournaments, for weekly chats with the reporters and editors who are involved with it. I’m not sure if it will go over as well as it did when we liveblogged our redesign, but if even a few readers pop in to talk about some of the matchups, I count that as a success.

The best thing about these tools, and others like it? They’re free. F to the R to the EE. How can anyone not take advantage of these powerful mediums to improve their paper? How can any journalist not see the benefits? I read a lot of comments and blogs from the curmudgeon brigade wishing for the days of yore – but how does one make them open their eyes and see that their Online departments are there to enhance journalism, to strengthen it, to improve it and strengthen its reputation among an increasingly technologically savvy world?