Resources

We’ve profiled a number of useful online journalism resources over the last few months, but there often isn’t space here to give each one more than a short introduction. Many of these tools have a bit of a learning curve and require you to invest a fair amount of time in them before you can use them effectively.

As always, the best approach is to jump in and test them out, but if you’re time poor or would like some assistance to ease you in, BBC social media consultant Claire Wardle’s training resources will help you get started. Her training handouts and screencasts have been designed with journalists in mind and give a detailed overview of many useful journalism tools.

Facebook and Twitter are the two dominant names in social media, and we’ve already covered how journalists can use Facebook and how newsrooms can use Twitter. 

But with the arrival of Google+, Google’s latest foray into social media, these two giants could be facing their first credible challenger. Just over a month after launching, Google+ has already amassed over 25 million users and is gaining more users daily. 

While it might be a bit early to be predicting what sort of staying power Google+ will have, it no doubt has potential as a tool for journalists.

Trunk.ly is a bookmarking tool that lets you extract links you have shared on social networks and turn them into an easily searchable archive.  

Document Cloud is an online tool that enables you to upload, store, share and publish documents online.  

In many ways it is like Scribd, a document sharing website which we have previously highlighted, but whereas Scribd is intended to make online reading in general easier DocumentCloud was built specifically with journalism in mind.