When Google announced their Media Tools page I immediately tried out some of the available features. These two videos were made using Google Earth Engine Timelapse, and they were quite easy and fast to do. Check out the other tools and examples, these can b quite handy for your stories. And the best part, they’re free.
Andy Dickinson updated his timeline of major events for online journalism. It is a great resource to understand how fast things have evolved and got bigger than many expected. It’s a great walk down Memory Lane, more intense than long, and it helps you put the whole business in perspective: lolcats, viral videos and hashtags haven’t been here forever. The road is long, still.
Mozilla launched Source, a repository for open source journalism tools and code, in collaboration with Knight News Foundation. Daniel Sinker highlights the importance of this project:
Journalism is in a time of massive innovation and reinvention. From data journalism to building news applications, news organizations both big and small are trying things anew. Rethinking the way the world learns about itself is a huge, exciting, and inspiring task. At OpenNews, we’re assisting this lofty goal by helping to strengthen and grow the code and community that is working to build journalism’s future. We do this through our fellowship program, through our sponsorship of hack days, through our code sprint grants, and now through Source.
With associated media companies like the New York Times, Al Jazeera or ProPublica, the tools are presented with real live examples, showing the value of coding in a modern newsroom.
Here’s a fancy open tool: Zapaday is a crowd supported news calendar. Regular users can learn about upcoming events like big newsrooms did, and for free, while contributing with new events themselves. In their own words:
While news agendas drive almost half of your daily news, they are either closed or prohibitively expensive. We believe an open democracy needs free and open press resources. Can’t have closed, paid news agendas driving so much of our daily news, can we?
Start now, set your regional and topic preferences and discover about the events that will for sure define the headlines in the near future.