#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – try the new Liveblog WordPress plugin

A WordPress plugin has just been released that allows WordPress users to turn any post into a liveblog. It offers users the ability to drag and drop photos into a post.

The Next Web has a full explainer:

Automattic, the company behind the hosted WordPress.com service, has just debuted a new live-blogging plugin, aptly titled Liveblog. The free tool allows WordPress users to quickly and easily turn any post into a liveblog, even existing ones, just by checking a box.

Read the rest of The Next Web’s post to find out more.

Journalism.co.uk is running an evening course on liveblogging in a couple of weeks. 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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Social media bar for WordPress acquired by sharing tool Buffer

Buffer, a platform that allows you to schedule and post tweets and social media posts at the best times, has today announced that it has acquired Dig Dig, a WordPress plugin that combines social media sharing buttons into one “floating share bar”.

The bar, similar to the one used by technology blog Mashable (such as in this article), allows you to display sharing buttons at the top or bottom of blog posts and offers sharing buttons such as online pinboard Pinterest and Buffer.

Since acquiring the plugin, Buffer says it has “refreshed the design of the plugin and worked out many bugs”.

Buffer is a previous Journalism.co.uk tool of the week for journalists. Co-founder of Buffer Leo Widrich spoke to us in this guide on how to best post on Twitter and Facebook.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to cross-post Google+ posts to a WordPress blog

Today’s tip explains how to cross-post your Google+ posts to your WordPress blog.

The Next Web tells you how you can do this using a WordPress plugin, Google+Blog.

The plugin lets you import your posts automatically to WordPress with next to no effort. Simply download and install the plugin, follow the instructions listed [in the article], and you’ll be able to share your Google+ posts with your blog followers who don’t have an account on the social networking site. There are two versions of the plugin – a paid and a free version, both of which you can download here.

The article guides you through installing the plugin.

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.

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Online newsroom allows freelancers to pitch and get paid

Kapost, a new site for web publishers, is about to launch a mechanism for paying journalists a bonus if their articles clock up a certain number of web hits, retweets or Facebook ‘likes’.

What is Kapost?

Kapost is an online system for web publishers to manage all areas of production.

It works in conjunction with a site’s own CMS, such as WordPress, and allows freelancers to pitch story ideas and get paid in a single click via PayPal. An invoicing service is coming soon.

There is a calendar for managing workflows and a CMS for any publisher that does not want to use their existing system.

Editors can drill down to view the performance of stories by author, on a categorised topic (such as health or education), or by individual story and analyse the traffic generated. Organisations can then opt to pay reporters an additional bonus for popular stories.

Grace Boyle from Kapost spoke to Journalism.co.uk from the company’s base in Colorado:

We don’t want to replace Google Analytics but we are taking the most important analytics metrics and we show which of your contributors are giving you the most traffic.

She added that Kapost’s aim is to reduce the amount of administrative duties required of editors.

Kapost is free for organisations with three people or less; it is $8 per user per month for larger organisations.

To see a demo of Kapost, click on the video below.

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Readers may have the last say in what is and is not journalism

ScribbleLive: Four ways to make money from liveblogging

WikiLeaks links with Brazilian partner to scrutinise US embassy cables

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Simple ways to embed a tweet in a news story

If you have ever wanted to include a tweet in a story and have opted for a screengrab instead of embedding it, here are two easy ways to save you time.

Updated panel tonight: David Blunkett MP, @vincecable, James O’Brien, Anna Soubry MP and Max Mosley. BBC1 at 10.35. #bbcqt

— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) May 12, 2011

Blackbird Pie

It is a year since Twitter released Blackbird Pie, which turns a tweets URL into embeddable code.

1. Click on the timestamp on a tweet (where it says ’1 minute ago’);

2. Copy the URL code and paste it into Blackbird Pie, click ‘bake it’ and copy and paste the code into your story;

3. Preview your story to see the tweet.
WordPress plugins

There’s a Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin but we like the Embedly WordPress plugin. Embedly allows URLs for dozens of other websites (including YouTube, Qik and Facebook) to be displayed as content-rich images.

It is a good solution for anyone who has problems when saving HTML in WordPress and is even easier to use as you simply paste the tweet’s URL into WordPress and it is automatically converted.

1. Download the plugin and add to WordPress;

2. Select which sites you want to embed in your blog;

3. Simply paste the URL of the tweet (by clicking the timestamp) into WordPress.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – news production plugin

This open source WordPress plugin called the Assignment Desk aims to bring the community into the story production process and also help with the management of the distribution and pitching of assignments. Tipster: Rachel McAthy.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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