Top tools and applications online journalists use to get the job done

New media consultant Vin Crosby’s question posed to the the Poynter Online-News and Online News Association listservs has stirred up quite a few responses.

Which Software Apps Do Online Journalists Use on the Job, he asked?

There are a number of standards, including Microsoft office and Adobe creative products, but there’s a lot more applications out there that online journalists and producers are using during their daily tasks.

Here’s a list of the applications I’ve seen mentioned far and a few others I didn’t see mentioned. (If I forgot something, add it to the list!)

Office Solutions:

• OpenOffice: This is the closest thing to Microsoft office you’ll see this side of free. Version 2.3 (download it) includes some nifty new features to go along with the word processor, spreadsheet, slideshow and illustration apps and database program.
  • My Thoughts: I haven’t used OpenOffice in a very long time. The site looks nice, but last time I used it, I remembered why I use the Microsoft Office suite. Give it a try though, could be of age by now.

• NeoOffice: Mac solution for open-source office application.
  • My Thoughts: First time I’ve heard of this. Give it a look. It’s Free!

Web Browsers: How you surf the web

• Firefox: Wouldn’t it be great if all we ever had to use was Firefox? It sports the most powerful web page rendering engine in the world, according to Mozilla. And why not trust them? They made it. (j/k) Truthfully though, this tool is free, and has garnered about 20-30 percent of the online browser market. It’s free too!
  • My Thoughts: I wish I could use it for everything. Sadly, many news sites are optimized for Internet Explorer only. That means certain CSS issues and drop down menus won’t work on some sites when viewed in Firefox. Regardless, if you want to pick up the IE tab plugin, you can use the Firefox browser as both a Mozilla client and an IE client. Also, there’s known issues on the memory leak in the browser and can slow your system if it’s left open for multiple hours. My real suggestion on this, use both Firefox and IE.

• Internet Explorer: This browser really grew up this year while feeling the heat from Firefox. It now features tabs, integrated RSS feeds, the ability to use Google Search instead of Microsoft’s live search. It’s a nice tool, and also free for Windows users, but not avaialble on Macs.
  • My Thoughts: It’s definitely better than before. But I prefer Firefox. IE7 renders pages much more nicely than before, but it still has internal style sheets in the browser that often breaks pages that are designed by CSS. It crashes for me often as well.

• Camino: Mac users rejoice. Mozilla’s answer for slow Firefox browsers in the Apple world.
  • My Thoughts: This is a great browser for macs. Not as nice as firefox, but a heck of a lot faster.

• Safari: Apple’s homegrown web browser, available for both Mac and Windows and the iPhone. Woohoo!
  • My Thoughts: I do love Macs (although I do most of my work on a PC), but I’m not sold on Safari. Camino wins for me on a Mac

• Honorable mention: Opera (My thoughts: blech)

RSS FeedReaders: If you aren’t using RSS and you’re in the online journalism world, or in any journalism world for that matter, or using the web at all, learn about these and get yourself a reader. These will make your life a lot easier (or more hectic – but at least you’ll get more info delivered to you)

• Google Reader: This is an online app provide free by Google to anyone with a Google account. The interface is simple, although leaves some design quality to be desired. It also allows you to easily share stories using a public shared feed, star your favorite stories for later reading and includes integration with Gmail. Also, it recently rolled out searching options to let users find what their looking for.
  • My Thoughts: This is the holy grail of feed readers, IMHO. Now that sharing is so big, this tool can be used to push content all over the web. Google rolled out a Reader facebook app so anything you want to share in your reader can appear on your Facebook profile and even show up in your Facebook feed. That means, if you share it, your friends and network can see it, thus tapping viral potential. Google also let’s you embed widgets in HTML that can give you a feed of your shared items, like I have on this blog. This tool has come a long way, and I think will continue to grow with the integration of Google Share.

• FeedDemon: Client side feed reader that has won a host of awards. For Windows.
  • My Thoughts: I need experience with it, and it looks like it has a really cool featured called “who’s linking here,” which might give you an indication on who is linking to which posts. That I would love to have.

Email:

• Microsoft Outlook: Seems to be the standard across the board. Like Word, it’s gotten a lot of attention from Microsoft developers over the years. Now it can also bring in RSS feeds (I believe MS’s term is “web feeds”).
  • My Thoughts: The program looks great. I should probably switch. I just don’t want too much Microsoft on my computer, you know?

• Thunderbird: Mozilla’s answer to the email problem. It’s got a lot of standard features, such as filtering, folders, RSS feed integration and also plays host to developers who want to add plugins. It’s free too!
  • My Thoughts: It’s what I use, but I have stopped giving out recommendations. The Mozilla team put far less resources toward building up Thunderbird than they did for Firefox. I’ve seen it crash my co-workers’ inboxes numerous times. It’s got a lot of great features and you can do tons of stuff with the plugins. But until Mozilla can really impress me again, I’m not telling anyone to switch to it.

• Google Mail: That’s right folks, you can use your Gmail account for work! Google has upgraded accounts that will give you more storage (not sure about options) and will act as a webmail service for you if you don’t have one. Free.
  • My Thoughts: Google is already shopping the Gmail service to universities to provide webmail service to thousands of students. If Gmail can handle that, I’m sure it can handle your work emails. If you haven’t used Gmail before, check it out.

FTP: Transfer files between your desktop and remote servers

• Filezilla: Free, open-source FTP program with SSH security, booyah! Has drag and drop capabilties and is available on most platforms.
  • My Thoughts: I’ve yet to use this, but several people in my office use it and say it’s a peach. I will check it out though. The SSH capability has my attention.

• SmartFTP: Shareware FTP program. Maybe it’s freeware. Whatever, it works great. Drag and drop capabilities and also allows you to leave open multiple connections at once. A real time saver.
  • My Thoughts: It’s what I use, and it works great. The multiple connections wins my heart. But there is an annoying message that pops up every time I open the application asking me to register it. I probably should buy it or check out Filezilla.

Image Manipulation: Cropping photos, sharpening images, you know the drill.

• Adobe Photoshop: Obviously this is the standard. The incredibly powerful photo manipulation product created by an Ann Arbor native has spurred a seemingly endless number of online tutorial sites, hacks, plugins, whatever. It’s a great tool, but can pinch the wallet.
  • My Thoughts: Easily the best tool out there. But I admit, even with a mother for a graphic artist and a web designer girlfriend, I know next to nothing about the possibilities of this application. Also, it’s very costly. Adobe did a free trial thing a while back for Mac users, but I think that has been discontinued. There are probably free versions of CS3 still floating around out there, but you’d probably have to find them on torrent sites.

• GIMP: This is the open-source little brother of Adobe Photoshop. “It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.”
  • My Thoughts: Same with OpenOffice, last time I used this (probably last summer) I was hyped up on having a free alternative to Photoshop. In the end, there’s a reason why I still use Photoshop. GIMP isn’t as easy to use and it can be a hassle to perform simple image resizing tasks. If you have the $1M liscense for Photoshop, stick with it.

• Picnik: Edit images in your browser.
  • My Thoughts: Wish to have a chance to try it, looks cool.

Video Editing: Didn’t you hear 2007 was the year of Internet video? Google is planning on integrating YouTube videos into the adsense network and there’s a myriad of players out there. What are you using.

• iMovie: Movie editing application included with the Apple iLife suite. This is an incredibly powerful video editor and easy enough to make someone with no experience a video editor.
  • My Thoughts: Very nice and easy for all levels, but is limited if you want to pull off the multimedia masterpiece.

• Final Cut Pro: Another Mac program, and pretty much the standard for high-end video editing at newspapers and other media organizations producing video for the web.
  • My Thoughts: Wish I had an Apple! I’ve got an OK Mac desktop, but it’s not strong enough to chug through the intense video editing that Final Cut offers. If you have a good Mac and enough time to devote to learning video editing, then this is the one for you.

• Sony Vegas: “Windows answer to Final Cut; NLE with pan & scan and all the goodies,” says one listserv respondent.
  • My Thoughts: Sad to say I only briefly tried this out a couple years back. Wasn’t a good choice for me, but I’m sure a great choice for others.

• Windows Movie Maker: Free application included in Windows’ OS installs. Simple, easy to use. Free for download too!
  • My Thoughts: Very simple and I got my start in video editing using this tool, but it can’t hold a flame to iMovie. There’s hacks available for this tool to make it more useful, but I’d recommend doing video editing on a Mac for ease.

Video Players: How are you getting your video on the web?

• YouTube: The standard in online video publication. Everyone from your sister’s kids to U.S. presidential hopefuls tap the promotional power of YouTube to get their messages out. This tool intigrates user profiles to allow for a true community to share videos. The uploading is easy and is owned by Google, so you most likely won’t have to worry about it getting shut down. The licensing has become an issue for some, but the promotional power is unparalleled.
  • My Thoughts: Number 1 far and away. Although the video can be grainy, try encoding the video in the recommended Divx format, at the appropriate sizes and lengths, and displaying the video in custom players with the correct dimensions, and you’ll have video nearly as good in quality to any other online player available. Plus, did I mention the million upon million of users who watch YouTube videos and share them? Hands down, the best video sharing and posting tool.

• Brightcove: Nice video player that converts video for you along the lines of YouTube.
  • My Thoughts: Looks nice and works great. Doesn’t have the promotional power of Youtube. Still voting for YouTube.

• Blip.TV: Really nice player with crisp playback. Allows you to embed videos and playlists like the other players.
  • My Thoughts: Looks great, but finding the embed code is not so easy. Also, the sharing power is much less than YouTubes.

Audio Editing: Make those podcasts ring out!

• Audacity: The darling of the open-source audio editing world. Here’s the goods: It’s free. It works. It’s recommended far and wide.
  • My Thoughts: Does anything you ask it to. I use SoundForge, but I won’t say I’m the happiest with that. If I had time to really dig into Audacity to learn it, I’m sure it’s the way to go.

• GarageBand: Mac users love this one. A cool audio editing program, but relegated to only Mac users.
  • My Thoughts: I’ve tried it. but didn’t seem to easy to use. I’m sure with dedicated time, it’d be a very nice tool.

Podcast/Videocast Tools: Listen to your favorite video and podcasts.

• iTunes: It’s the standard. You can listen to your music, share your playlist, download podcasts, browse the iTunes podcast directory. It does it all.
  • My Thoughts: Eh, I’m really getting tired up updating my iTunes player every other day. Apple rollsout updates non-stop and all that’s happening is it’s getting more and more bloated. Slower. I’d love the program, if Apple would trim the fat.

• Juice: Cross-platform podcast receiving application.
  • My Thoughts: I haven’t used it, but at least one listserv respondent loves it.

• Fireant: Videocast receiving tool.
  • My Thoughts: Another tool I used when it was first released. I now mostly use Google reader to subscribe to podcasts and videocasts. After looking at the site, looks like Fireant has come a long way. Give it a try.

• Feedforall: Create, edit and publish RSS feeds.
  • My Thoughts: Would like to try it, but haven’t.

Other tools:

• Google Maps: You’ve used them, now build them. Google rolls out mymaps to allow you to easily create your maps and embed them anywhere, including your blog. Find cool ideas for Google Maps.
• Google Earth: Find out what the commotion is. Check out your street, see what’s going on across the ocean. Waste tons of hours. Or do something innovative with it like
• FeedBurner: Redirect your XML feed from you blog to get better stats tracking and cool things like smartcasting and adding Facebook share links in your feed footers.
• Soundslides: Make cool professional-looking audio slideshow presentations with this very easy and inexpensive tool, made by newspaper people.

Did I leave anything out? What other applications do you use and what are their features?