#Tip of the day for journalists: Save to Drive Chrome extension

Image by stshank on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Mashable yesterday reported on a new extension called Save to Drive for Google Chrome, which offers users a button to let them save content online straight to their Google Drive.

As Mashable reports, users can “save an image, an entire page or an image of the visible page to your Drive”, as well as “the HTML source code of a webpage or a complete webpage in web archive (.mht) format”.

This might prove useful for journalists who come across content while searching the web.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Learn how to find ‘hidden’ web content

Image by Nit Soto on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Investigative journalist Colin Meek (who also leads courses in advanced online research skills) has created a visualisation on how to search the ‘hidden’ web.

Introducing the visualisation, Meek says when training others in research skills, he has found that there is “a lot of confusion about exactly why a lot of web content is ‘hidden’ from view and why ordinary search engines are not only hopeless at reaching ‘hidden web’ content they are doing an increasingly poor job of accessing breaking news or ‘real-time media”.

Follow this link to see Meek’s “conceptual description of the four main data sources available to journalists and researchers: the hidden web, the searchable web, people and breaking news”.

He includes notes on the best research tools available.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Learn from fake Hurricane Sandy pictures

There are a couple of good posts on how to verify images from social media following the sharing of fake Hurricane Sandy pictures on Twitter and Facebook.

Fiona McCann from social news agency Storyful has written a guide on how to spot a fake image in three easy steps. She talks through the process of using Google Images and TinEye and reminds journalists to check sources.

On Poynter Craig Silverman has shared links to useful verification articles.

Here is a guide on verification published earlier this year by Journalism.co.uk.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: Researching with Google Images

Colin Meek, who runs Journalism.co.uk’s advanced research skills training course, recently posted two tutorials on his site which look at how to use Google Images as a research tool. According to Meek, “using image search properly can help you focus your research in unexpected ways especially when your research subject has a strong visual element”.

See the first tutorial here, which looks at the “basic and advanced options that demonstrate the potential of images as a research tool”. The second tutorial addresses “the ‘search-by-image’ reverse image search that takes things to a different level”.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#Tip of the day for journalists: BBC News advice on headline writing for SEO

The BBC Internet Blog has a post on search engine optimisation in BBC News.

Martin Asser, senior product manager, news & knowledge, BBC Future Media, shares advice that he gives BBC journalists.

I have given colleagues a four-point checklist for their headlines as the most effective way of making that happen. (As long as they follow the basic principles of journalistic storytelling, the rest should take care of itself.)

The points are:

1. Use words that people would use in search in order to find the information being provided

2. Avoid words that people would never use in search to find that content

3. Put the most searchable elements at the front

4. Proper names are often used in search, so – following rules 1 and 3 – names should be included in the headline and if appropriate at the front.

It is worth reading the full post, which expands on the points. It is also interesting to note the maximum length of a BBC headline is 55 characters.

Asser states:

Journalists are given 55 characters (including spaces) to express their creativity, a length chosen because it equates to the space allocated for the page title on a Google search results page.

And it’s worth reading to the bottom of the post for the hedgehog headline.

Also see our guide on how to write headlines for SEO.

Journalism.co.uk runs a one-day course in SEO. Details are at this link.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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Tool of the week for journalists: Tagboard, for searching social networks (including App.net)

Tool of the week: Tagboard

What is it? A tool for searching social networks, including recently launched App.net

How is it of use to journalists? Tagboard is still being built but an early version is available. Enter a hashtag and you can search across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and App.net.

You do not have to be members of the networks to search.

App.net was launched last month as a Twitter-like social network but one that is ad-free and fully open to developers to create apps. You can see the global feed of all conversations taking place on App.net at this link.

In order to build the network without later selling advertising, App.net charges users $50 per year. It’s still in its early stages but developers are busy working on third-party apps (such as Tagboard).

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App of the week for journalists: Njuice, for surfacing trending news stories

App of the week: Njuice

Phones: iPhone, iPad, web (and soon-to-be on Android)

Cost: Free

What is it? Njuice is an app and website that allows you to see what stories are trending on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks

How is it of use to journalists? Njuice is a social reader for surfacing trending stories in real-time. The app displays the story and an orange triangle tells you how many times the story has been shared.

Where Njuice differs from social readers such as Flipboard, Zite and Pulse is that Njuice focusses on what is trending.

And where the beauty of other social newsreaders is personalisation, journalists can select Njuice to see what stories are trending globally, stories which they may not learn about in apps delivering personalised content.

There are some personalisation options in Njuice, with options to follow categories such as “technology” and “world news”, but one of the strengths of the app is to see what is trending overall.

(Incidentally the most shared story, with more than 27,000 shares, was TMZ’s post of Prince Harry’s Vegas photos, so we didn’t include the “top news” screengrab).

Have you got a favourite app that you use as a journalist? Fill in this form to nominate an app for Journalism.co.uk’s app of the week for journalists.

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Tool of the week for journalists: WolframAlpha

Tool of the week: WolframAlpha

What is it? WolframAlpha bills itself as “a computational knowledge engine”.

It is like a search engine but where search engines “index web pages, then look for textual matches, then give you lists of links to follow”, WolframAlpha uses “built-in knowledge curated by human experts”.

According to the site, “it works by using its vast store of expert-level knowledge and algorithms to automatically answer questions, do analysis, and generate reports”.

In a video introducing the engine, Stephen Wolfram explains that it’s an “ambitious project that’s just getting started”, and encourages users to expect it to get better with age.

How is it of use to journalists? One of the reasons journalists turn to WolframAlpha rather than Google is to verify information.

For example, in this guide to verifying information from social media, Claire Wardle, director of development and integration at social news agency Storyful, says journalists there use WolframAlpha to ask certain questions, such as the weather in a certain place at a certain time, to verify images or video shared on social media.

In the above example I asked WolframAlpha for the weather in Damascus, Syria. You can also get cleverer and ask a question such as “what was the weather in Islamabad the day Osama bin Laden was killed?”

A word of warning: as with all statistics, do cross-check. For example, ask WolframAlpha how many journalists there are in the UK and it encourages you to ask the question around “reporters and correspondents” in the US.

WolframAlpha tells you there were 46,130 reporters and correspondents in the US in 2009 (which seems low, although Jon Slattery’s blog does report a 2012 figure of 40,600 “editors and reporters” in 2012 based on stats from the American Society of News Editors). It gives average salary ($34,360 in 2009) and the median wage yearly change (-$430) and presents you with graphs and charts.

Do you use WolframAlpha as a journalist? Any tips? Share yours in the comments section below.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to write headlines for SEO

Mashable has a post on bad, good, better and best practice when writing headlines for SEO.

The advice is at this link.

Journalism.co.uk runs a one-day course on SEO, a practical guide to getting your work found. The next one takes place in June.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

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#jpod – How web analytics can provide story leads and new angles

Analytics can give you much more information than just your number of readers. Delve deeper and analytics can also lead to news stories and help shape editorial angles as a story unfolds.

In this week’s podcast Sarah Marshall, Journalism.co.uk’s technology correspondent, speaks to:

• Laura Amico, who set up Washington DC-based Homicide Watch. Laura explains how she gets news stories by looking at the different terms people are searching for.
• Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, a real-time analytics company used by major publishers including Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Tony gives examples of how news organisations respond to what audiences are reading.

Podcast: Download

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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