On Poynter there’s a detailed ‘how-to’ by Casey Frechette which runs through 10 tips on improving the way audio is produced and presented in multimedia output.

He writes that “sound can make or break a multimedia production”, and as a result offers a collection of tips on getting it right, from understanding and using four different types of audio in projects to introducing “layers to create richer sound”.

Here is his full list.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – driving traffic from YouTube
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• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – toolkits for journalists
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – key elements to podcasting

Social magazine app Flipboard has added audio, allowing users to listen to a podcast, an interview or music while flipping through the pages of the app.

Flipboard is an iPhone and iPad app (soon to be on Android) that allows users to sync with their Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and other accounts to receive personalised news content.

Flipboard has partnered with SoundCloud for audio (which provides content including Journalism.co.uk’s podcasts), National Public Radio and Public Radio International (PRI).

As The Next Web reports:

It’s a marvellous new way to distribute and listen to audio content, one I might just use specifically for podcasts. The user experience is unquestionably superior to iTunes.

And how long before we see Flipboard dive into video? It’s somewhat surprising it hasn’t decided to explore the video space first. The social magazine already includes a video category but is limited in sources and isn’t ideal for video browsing. With no clear winner in the video magazine space (see ShowYou and TNW Startup Rally winner Shelby.tv), Flipboard can still make it its own.

BBC News and TechCrunch both have details on the Flipboard development.

• World’s first social magazine launches on iPad
• How to record audio interviews using Facebook’s new video option
• NPR offers ‘takeaway’ news audio
• Flipboard adds Telegraph and Guardian ahead of royal wedding
• App of the week for journalists – Flipboard

Still from 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera
en:Dziga Vertov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I was asked to give a talk to a BBC Global Video away-day on the future of video, looking at what their audiences will be watching in the coming years.

The Global Video department was launched last year and makes video to run cross-platform in multiple languages on all the BBC’s Global News outlets: World News, BBC.com and 27 World Service language services. The team never makes a video just for one language or site, changing the voiceover and translating the film into two or more languages.

What will audiences be watching?

There are countless examples of innovations in video journalism, including many from the 40 videos a week produced by Global Video.

Here are a few examples of trends in online video journalism and innovations using emerging technologies.

Documentary:  Just as long-form journalism has a place in the digital sphere, so too do long-form video documentaries using TV and cinema conventions of storytelling.

For example, here is the Guardian’s 32 minute ‘I will never be cut’: Kenyan girls fight back against genital mutilation, which recently won a Webby award.

Web native: As online video has developed, it has found its own style and some filmmakers are telling stories using a new set of rules. Multimedia producer Adam Westbrook has written many articles arguing for online video to encourage subjects to look directly at the camera, abandon the “noddy” (the way video often hides an edit by showing a clip of the interviewer nodding) and instead add a flash to white or black, acknowledging the edit to the viewer.

Storytelling: With the advent of online came new storytelling techniques such as audio slideshows, graphics and ways of visualising data. The BBC Global Video unit has its own fantastic examples, including this video made by Tom Hannen using Adobe After Effects and brilliantly telling the story of blood doping.

The Economist too is experimenting with storytelling in words. Here is an example.

Videos filmed on small, cheap cameras: The Global Video unit itself is equipping its journalists in the field with video news gathering skills. Elise Wicker from the department has written about how she has been training staff overseas to use Kodak cameras to capture footage.

Here is an example of an Al Jazeera documentary filmed entirely on an iPhone. Syria: Songs of defiance is a first-person film made by a journalist who spent many months in Syria but could not risk being seen with a video camera. This film, complete with time lapses shows how a great film can be made in the process of the edit.

Contextual video: Advances in web browsers allow new possibilities. Here are three examples made using Popcorn JS, a JavaScript open-source library from Mozilla allowing video to link to real-time web content such as tweets, Google Maps and Wikipedia entries.

History in the Streets is an audio recording uploaded to SoundCloud with locations linked so that when the audio refers to a place, the viewer is taken to that location on Google Street View and can navigate and explore.

Open Images, Open Data is a Dutch film showing a video surrounded by real-time links to content from several sites, including Wikipedia.

This example of a film about freedom of the press in France links to the source documents, demonstrating how journalists can link to data or research to back up a claim.

Development of Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker tool could allow video journalists without coding skills to produce similar video.

How will audiences be finding and sharing content?

Social sharing is key to the future of video and the format lends itself to a social experience with YouTube demonstrating how videos can go viral.

Social is overtaking search as a way to discover content. Facebook overtook Google in March as a traffic driver to the Guardian, largely down to the news outlet’s “frictionless sharing” Facebook app.

New audiences will be finding and frequently watching video on social networks, whether they be Facebook, Twitter, or Chinese site Renren.

Video is often a component of a wider narrative too. Storify is a free tool allowing anyone to curate a story by dragging in tweets, Flickr photos, SoundCloud audio and video from YouTube and Vimeo.

And platforms such as Storify, YouTube, Vimeo, Bambuser, and many more have their own communities and networks too.

Here is an example of what Mark Boas, one of the Knight-Mozilla Fellows, is doing. He is embedded within the newsroom of Al Jazeera and looking at how you can socially share content without detracting from the experience of viewing a video.

Boas told me that part of what is driving this is social, partly the second screen, partly web-enabled TV, partly browser technologies.

He is experimenting with social sharing text from within The fight for Amazonia. Content is pulled live from a Google Doc, he explained.

Writing on his blog, Boas describes the possibilities of social.

Technology is available now to allow people to chat and comment over the web. Certainly this is an experience we could build in. Imagine if you could see all the people currently watching the same programme as you and interact with them.

Boas believes this social layer is key but that it should not “significantly distract from the main content”.

He thinks the social experience benefits from integrating existing social networks and will “perhaps create new ones surrounding the video medium”.

People like to share their experiences in general and this certainly seems to hold true of video and media in general.

He has ideas for future implementations, including “the use of word accurate hyperlinked transcripts, full support for mobile devices and second-screen synchronisation.”

In an email Boas told me:

I think many like me are experimenting just now. I myself am very interested in making experiences that don’t distract too much from the principle act of watching video but I feel that the challenge here is to allow the viewer to choose the level of interactivity and make that choice as plain as obvious and seamless as possible.

3. What will people be watching video on?

Web-enabled TV: Web technologies and television are converging with the advent of web-enabled TV.

The New York Times earlier this month asked “Why can’t TV navigation be more like a tablet?” That looks likely with the next generation of viewing options, including video on demand available on games consoles and an increasing number of TV apps.

Web-enabled TV is expected to offer users an experience more like navigating using a tablet, with viewers able to control the screen by a series of touch screen gestures and swipes.

If rumours of the new Apple TV are to be believed, this may take the form of a Siri voice-activated TV made by Apple (a later development than Apple TV, a box which is plugged into a regular TV to stream iTunes content).

It is also reported that set-top manufacturer LG will be offering televisions with Google TV later this month, with features including voice activation, the ability for viewers to watch video-on-demand content and web videos and control of content by touch screen and swipes.

Google TV will also allow friends or contacts in different locations to watch video together as it will incorporate Google Hangouts, the Skype-like video option from Google Plus.

Desktops/laptops: BBC Global Video’s audience may access content on different connections than those that spring to mind when you first think of web video.

The number of home broadband connections are low in some of the countries covered by the 27 language services, with large proportions of audiences connecting with dongles and other 3G connections in some countries. Video may be easier to stream on a 3G connection at certain times of the day, and impossible at busier times.

Audiences may also use proxies to circumvent internet restrictions in countries such as China, which can give a slow connection.

Tablets: Tablets are increasingly popular in some of the countries served by BBC Global Video, and take-up is low in other countries.

Whether they become an important platform in poorer countries remains to be seen but there is no doubt that they have already become important for more affluent audiences.

And tablets can provide a beautifully tactile viewing experience, with readers encouraged to use the touch screen to play a video embedded within a news story.

Mobile: The popularity of mobile and likelihood of possibilities for video viewing should not be ignored.

It is worth noting that 87 per cent of the world population has a mobile phone, compared with just 8.5 per cent having fixed broadband. According to stats on Mobithinking, there are 5.9 billion phones compared with half a billion fixed broadband connections.

In Jordan the number of mobiles exceeds the population with 6.2 million phones to 6 million people, according to Ayman Salah, a technology expert based in the Middle East.

In Egypt there are 74 million mobiles for a population of 84 million, Salah said, with mobiles being introduced commercially in 1997. That compares with 11 million landlines, first introduced almost 100 years ago in 1920.

The BBC World Service sites and BBC.com are well served by mobile sites that recognise the phone type and format video accordingly.

But of course mobiles are not all Androids, BlackBerrys and iPhones. Smartphones are less common in poorer countries, and different brands dominate. According to the Economist, Nokia ranks with Coca-Cola as Africa’s most recognised brand.

So what is the future of video in Africa if smartphone penetration is low? I asked mobile expert Peter Paul Koch (also known as PPK online).

“Don’t focus too much on smartphones,” he warned.

Today’s feature phones are getting more and more functionality, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they add video in the near future. The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring, and pretty soon we’ll see “feature phones” (as in cheap) with “smartphone” functionality.

And video is growing on mobile. Cisco predicts that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.

Mobile video will increase 25-fold between 2011 and 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.

Mobile is intimate. It is in your pocket, it is personal and is there when you have a spare five minutes to watch a web video.

What is the future of video? With a growing trend in social sharing, an ever-expanding range of devices and internet connections, including to mobile, the future is bright.

• Economist seeks to build relationships with 1m Facebook fans
• A social media documentary coming this spring
• Video from Beet.tv: How Reuters used social media in Iran to source video
• Innovations in Journalism – a plug in to ease sorting through web images and video from PicLens
• Wired.com: Blip TV brings out video embeds for iPhone

Online journalism tutor Mindy McAdams has provided links to a series of audio slideshows, all created by journalism students.

Writing on her blog she says:

Sometimes it’s a challenge to find appropriate examples to show to students. Of course we professors love to show them work by top multimedia journalists — but that can be intimidating. Seeing good work by other students can inspire undergraduates to step up and do better.

Here is a link to the post detailing the audio slideshow examples.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – embed slideshows using Vuvox
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – data journalism inspiration
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• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – YouTube for audio interviews
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to set up a recording studio

The Associated Press is supplying feed of Super Tuesday vote results to a Google Map which subscribers to the news agency will be able to embed on their news site and other platforms.

In a release, AP said it is working with Google are to make the mapping application available to subscribers of AP Election Services for today’s Super Tuesday results, when 10 states cast their votes to select a Republican candidate to challenge President Barack Obama in November’s election.

Brian Scanlon, director of AP Election Services said in the release:

Our subscribers have always had the option to create these maps on election night, but some of them faced cross-platform challenges. Now, we have a turnkey mapping solution. Its an arrangement that not only makes sense for AP and Google, but also our customers and ultimately the end-user.

Eric Hysen of the Google Politics & Elections team said:

Google is excited to work with the Associated Press to help visualise and distribute the state-by-state results for Super Tuesday. Our Google results maps will show statewide and county level AP results in real-time at google.com/elections. AP subscribers will also be able to embed the results map on their own websites. We look forward to a successful and exciting Super Tuesday.

• Multimedia collaborations provide Super Tuesday coverage online
• YouTube videos now available in Google Maps
• Google launches What Do You Love search
• Washington Post buys #election hashtag for midterms
• Website changes for PA on its 140th anniversary

The Times has unveiled an experimental new web application that aims to bring the “newspaper-like” tablet reading experience to ordinary web browsers.

The app, which currently works on Google Chrome and Safari, will be available for a two-week trial from today. Described as “like reading the newspaper, but with all the interactivity of the web”, it features enhanced graphics, picture galleries and videos.

Times web development editor Lucia Adams said on Twitter: “Readers told us they loved the linear reading of our tablet app, so we made it for the web too.”

Existing Times subscribers can test it out here.

• #FollowJourn: @luciatimes/web development editor
• Media release: The Scotsman launches £7.99-a-month iPad app
• #mobilemedia11: Over 55s with iPads are ‘sweet spot’ for Telegraph
• paidContent: Seven more tablet titles on the horizon at Nomad Editions
• News Corp nearing a decision on ‘tablet-centric’ unit

Sky News correspondent Nick Martin has some advice for journalists using a mobile phone to record video.

He shared his tips at last week’s news:rewired journalism conference.

According to this post on three pieces of advice for journalists reporting using a mobile phone, Martin advises:

1. Practise

2. Don’t panic!

3. Use mobile reporting only when it was appropriate, explaining “that it is not worth setting up a tripod and XLR cables for an iPhone when the cameraman is just five minutes away”.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – tools for journalists from CES 2012
• #Tip: Follow Sky News reporter in using Bambuser to livestream video
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – kit checklist for mobile reporting
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – a mobile media toolkit for smartphone reporting

The Huffington Post has announced the launch of a new online video channel this summer, at a conference to coincide with the site’s first anniversary under AOL ownership.

The HuffPost Streaming Network will launch this summer and feature original programming and debates, produced from studios in New York and Los Angeles. Editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington said the project would launch with 12 hours of daily programming and would eventually go to 24 hours.

Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser spoke to Huffington at the press conference.

She said:

It’s going to be really produced, not in any way thrown together.

The opportunities are enormous from the point of view of advertising. More and more of our readers want to consume video. It is completely interactive.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – video reporting from conferences
• BeetTV: ‘I didn’t kill newspapers’ says craigslist founder
• Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads
• Beet.tv: Why readers watch video on the NY Times and WSJ
• #jpod in depth: Huffington Post lands in the UK

Tool of the week: Tableau Public

What is it? A data visualisations tool, allowing you to create interactive graphs, charts and maps.

How is it of use to journalists? Tableau Public is a free tool that allows journalists to upload an Excel spreadsheet or text file and turn the data into an interactive visualisation that you can embed on your news site or blog.

Here are five examples of how Tableau has been used by news sites to tell stories. A quick browse will give you a sense of how the tool can be used to explain news stories.

• We aint got no history: Chelsea passing analysis
• Guardian Datablog: Gender pay gap
• New Scientist: Hurricanes in 2011
• PocketLint: Mobile OS Market Share
• Qualita Della Vita [in Italian]

One of Tableau’s real strengths is providing the reader with the opportunity to move a slider or select a drop down and see how the visualisation alters when a variable changes.

In order to create a visualisation you will need a PC (or a Windows environment on your Mac) and to download the free software.

I was able to upload an Excel file and within less than two minutes had produced a map showing what are predicted to be the most-populous countries in 2100.

I had previously used this data set to create a visualisation in Google Fusion Tables and Tableau was equally easy to navigate.

For those who have not tried creating data visualisations, Tableau requires no technical ability and is easier to use than the wizard options that allow you to create graphs in Excel.

There are options for sorting and reordering data, plus changing the colours and view options.

Tableau also has a paid-for option. The difference between the free tool and the premium option is that Tableau Public requires you to publish your visualisation to the web.

Tableau launched version 7.0 a couple of weeks ago and will soon be adding functionality allowing you to create a map using UK postcodes, according to Ross Perez, data analyst at the US-based company.

Disclaimer: Tableau Public is a sponsor of the Journalism.co.uk-organised conference news:rewired. This relationship did not influence this review.

• News numeracy: online tools for reporting numbers
• Tool of the week for journalists – ZeeMaps, for interactive maps
• Visual.ly – a new tool to create data visualisations
• Visual.ly illustrates the evolution of open data
• #media140 – Impure visual data tool to tell the story

Tool of the week: Spool

What is it? Spool is like Instapaper or Read it Later for video. It allows you to to save videos to watch later.

How is it of use to journalists? How many times have you come across a video on a news site or YouTube when you don’t have the time to watch it?

Spool allows you to save videos you’ve found during the day for viewing later. And what is great about it is that it records the video, allowing you to watch it offline, perhaps on the train home from work.

It saves it in HTML5 so videos or documents that started as Flash can be viewed on an Apple device.

Spool is not just for video – it allows you to save any webpage – but it is video that sets it apart from similar platforms for saving news articles.

You can also add the option of saving the videos, articles and documents to Dropbox or Evernote.

Spool has iPhone/iPad and Android apps to access your saved videos and to allow you to save more.

It is still in private beta and requires you to apply for an invitation. These appear to be sent out almost immediately.

• App of the week for Journalists: DropSync for Android – syncs with DropBox
• ‘If this then that’: ten recipes for journalists
• App of the week for journalists – DropVox, for saving audio to Dropbox
• App of the week for journalists: Byword, a great text editor for iPhone/iPad
• Tool of the week for (photo)journalists: ZangZing

Wired.com has published a feature about tongue-in-cheek gaming, adding a playful twist by turning the article into a game.

In a feature called the curse of Cow Clicker: How a cheeky satire became a videogame hit, Wired.com reports on how a “cow-clicking game” (FarmVille), inspired another cow clicking game (Cow Clicker), by adding a cow clicking element to the feature – perhaps a first in digital storytelling.

Every time a reader clicks on the word “cow” – repeated 97 times within the feature – a graphic of a cow appears, with the “cownter” keeping track of how many cows have been clicked on. The cows in fact obscure the text therefore making it more difficult to read the article.

Readers can also click on the graphical cows to send them to their Facebook friends.

The feature is intended to “echo the theme” of the Cow Clicker Facebook game discussed in the feature, Shannon Perkins editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com told Journalism.co.uk. “It’s an intentionally trivial experience obscuring a more content rich experience,” he said.

Cow Clicker was created by Ian Bogost, a game developer, academic and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at play. The game, which peaked at 56,000 players, was inspired by popular Facebook game FarmVille.

The Wired.com featured includes an interview with Bogost.

… This thought popped into my head,” Bogost says: “Games like FarmVille are cow clickers. You click on a cow, and that’s all you do. I remember thinking at the time that it felt like a one-liner, the kind of thing you would tweet. I just put it in the back of my mind.”

He developed Cow Clicker with “transparently stupid prizes—bronze, silver, and golden udders and cowbells—that people could win only by amassing an outlandish number of points. (A golden cowbell, for instance, requires 100,000 clicks.)”

On one level, this was all part of the act. Bogost was inhabiting the persona of a manipulative game designer, and therefore it made sense to pull every dirty trick he could to make the game as sticky and addictive as possible. But as he grew into the role, he got a genuine thrill from his creation’s popularity. Instead of addressing a few hundred participants at a conference, he was sharing his perspective with tens of thousands of players, many of whom checked in several times a day.

• Shannon Perkins, editor of interactives at Wired.com, who is behind this interactive will be speaking on newsgames at news:rewired. Also presenting in the session is Bobby Schweizer, Ian Bogost’s co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at play.

• For a day of inspirational ideas in journalism sign up to attend news:rewired – media in motion. It is being held at MSN HQ, London on 3 February 2012.

• #jpod: How video games can tell news stories
• Ten examples of games used to tell news stories
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using newsgames in journalism
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – post to Facebook at 9am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm
• #wef11: ‘Many journalists are slaves to a CMS – think beyond that’

If you’re interested in creating audio and/or photo slideshows on news events you may find some inspiration in the selection collected here by the Online News Association.

The ONA’s post also features a link to a previous article which outlines how to use Final Cut Pro to produce such slideshows, as a possible “alternative to Soundslides”.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using Soundslides
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The Economist created a short video following a discussion earlier this year and online debate on “the future of news”.

It was first posted on YouTube in October but makes some good end-of-year viewing. It is also worth watching as a nice example of storytelling in online video.

The news industry debate put forward the motion that “this house believes that the internet is making journalism better, not worse”, with author, blogger and journalism professor at New York University Jay Rosen defending the motion and author, blogger and writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley Nicholas Carr speaking against the motion.

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• Paul Carr: Calling ‘time of death’ on London 2.0

One of the sessions at news:rewired – media in motion will look at how newsgames and gaming mechanics are being used in journalism.

Shannon Perkins, editor of interactive technologies at Wired.com and who created Cutthroat Capitalism, a game where the player puts themselves in the position of a Somali pirate, will be coming over from the US to speak at news:rewired. In a Journalism.co.uk podcast he said a reader should “develop a deeper sense of the underlying themes of a story” by playing a game.

Another speaker presenting in the newsgames session at news:rewired is Bobby Schweizer, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play. He will also be joining us from the US.

Here is a list of 10 newsgames to give an idea of how games can be used in storytelling.

1. The world at seven billion (BBC)

This BBC interactive, which uses gaming mechanics, is proof that newsgames go viral. The world at seven billion was the most shared and “liked” news story on Facebook of 2011 with 339,149 shares, comments and likes. It was also the most clicked story on Facebook this year and was the fourth most popular news story on Twitter in 2011 with 73,783 tweets.

2. Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway? (Guardian)

A newsgame was also the second most popular news story on Facebook in 2011, with 219,023 shares, likes and comments. It is the Guardian quotes quiz where readers are asked to guess whether a line is a quote from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi or actor Charlie Sheen.

This one was “produced very quickly”, according to the Guardian, and is an idea that could inspire small news organisations without a budget for big game development.

3. Cutthroat Capitalism (Wired.com)

This newsgame was created by news:rewired speaker Shannon Perkins after reading an article in Wired Magazine. The player becomes a Somali pirate. The game states:

You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

4. Los 33 (Chilean miners) (Chilean design firm Root33)

This newsgame is based on the rescue of the Chilean miners trapped underground in 2010. According to Bobby Schweizer, who will be speaking at news:rewired, the game, which asks the player to rescue the miner, provides an insight into the slow process involved in rescuing each miner.

You perform the rescue 33 times if you want to finish the game – which is impossible really to complete. It’s trying to get across that concept that maybe you can’t explain in a written article.

When you see video clips edited together of each of the miners returning to the surface you have three to five seconds of each of their faces, you don’t get that real sense of how long it actually took. The game was able to express that in the way that other stories couldn’t.

5. How should I vote in the General Election? (Telegraph)

This is a game produced by the Telegraph. It asks users to answer a series of questions to find their values and concerns. The game then cross-checks responses with party pledges and the player is then told how they should be voting. This game received much attention as voters were often surprised by the results the game returned.

6. The budget calculator (most major news sites)

Perhaps the most widely used form of gaming mechanics used in news is the budget calculator. The viewer enters a salary, the fuel-type of their car, amount of alcohol units consumed per week and other details and then gets told how much better or worse off they will be based on the new budget.

This budget calculator from the BBC shows gaming mechanics in online news is nothing new – going back at least 10 years. Here are BBC examples from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

7. Christmas on the high street: retail winners and losers (Guardian)

At the beginning of this year the Guardian produced an interactive based on the Monopoly board. By clicking on each retailer the player finds out how business faired last Christmas.

8. Obameter (PolitiFact)

PolitiFact also uses gaming mechanics, such as with its Obameter, which tracks the US President’s campaign promises, the Truth-O-Meter (which also comes in app form) to test politicians’ and the GOP Pledge-O-Meter to rank political promises.

Speaking at the World Editors Forum in October founder and editor of the site Bill Adair said he felt there was “a tremendous lack of imagination” in the news industry in how to take advantage of new publishing platforms.

It’s like we’ve been given a brand new canvas with this whole palette of colours and we’re only painting in grey. We need to bring all the other colours to this new canvas.

9. Dollars for Docs (ProPublica)

US investigative news site ProPublica regularly uses gaming mechanics in news stories, such as with Dollars for Docs which enables people to find out whether their health professional has received money from drugs companies. Speaking at the World Editors Forum Scott Klein, editor of news applications, told the conference that as well as adding context, a news app has the ability to personalise and place the user at the centre of the story and offer them the ability to see the impact on them. “It doesn’t just tell a story, it tells your story,” he said.

10.  Fix the deficit (New York Times)

Here’s a budget puzzle from the New York Times. The reader is asked to work out where to make spending cuts to balance the books and hopefully get a sense of the financial challenges, tough decisions and the size of the shortfall.

Want to find out more about newsgames? Book a ticket for news:rewired here.

Recommended reading, viewing and listening:

• Newsgames: Journalism at Play, by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer (who will be speaking at news:rewired)
• The European Journalism Centre has an interesting post on newsgames that includes links to other examples of games
• This video on a session on gaming in news at ONA11, a US conference for journalists
• Matt McAlister from the Guardian has blogged on a related theme asking whether journalism can fuel game development
• A post by Philip Trippenbach, currently editor-in-chief of Citizenside and about to take up a new role at Edelman Digital who frequently blogs about video gaming and gaming mechanics details a talk he gave at a previous news:rewired
• Mary Hamilton has blogged about news games back in 2009
• There is also a Journalism.co.uk podcast on how video games can tell news stories

This is a cross-post from news:rewired.

• #jpod: How video games can tell news stories
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using newsgames in journalism
• #wef11: ‘Many journalists are slaves to a CMS – think beyond that’
• Wired.com gets playful with cow clicking interactive
• New Scientist: ‘The best journalism of the future might not be read, but played’

App of the week: Voddio

Operating systems: Apple (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad)

Cost: Free (you will need to pay £2.49 to unlock the sending and sharing functions)

What is it and how is it of use to journalists?

Voddio allows you to record and edit audio and video in multitrack and produce audio slideshows.

It is the latest app from Vericorder, which makes apps for journalists, and combines the functionality from its other paid-for apps – 1st Video, VC Audio Pro and Showcase – in a single app, which is free to download.

Voddio has has the ability to produce richer slideshows than earlier app Showcase, introducing titles and transitions for images.

After testing and creating audio, video and slideshows users can then opt to pay to unlock the sending and sharing functions.

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