Donald O'Mahony's Comm 361 class blog

This chapter gives advice on two levels. Personally, it explains how to sort through online information on a daily basis without being overwhelmed. Professionally, it explains how a journalist can use technology as an opportunity to get ahead.

The first tip the chapter gives is to organize your email with filters and folders. It gives a few rules that, if followed, can save time.

• Limit time that your email program is up on the screen. Check email in between tasks instead of getting distracted by each new email.
• Spend two minutes on each email. If you can respond within that time, great. If not, file it away for later.
• Only look at an email once. This saves time and energy.
• Finish all email sessions with an empty inbox. File read emails into different folders to help clear out the inbox.

The next tip is to find the right personal productivity tool. These are useful in saving time and energy while working on what needs to be done. The books says, “The key is to find as few solutions as possible that do as many of the things on your list as possible.”

Developing a strategy is a good way to finish your taks efficiently. The book gives the equation of “what you need to manage + the right tools to manage it = personal productivity.” This is just more incentive to find the right tools.

Another tip is to sort your contacts by using a tool in your email or a spreadsheet. The contacts will be “more sortable, more flexible and more useful,” according to the book.

Building spreadsheets is important as journalism moves into the digital world. They are a great way to store and sort the data of just about anything. When making a spreadsheet, use as much information as possible. The more fields your spreadsheet has, the easier it is to sort your data.

The book gives the example of building a spreadsheet for all the books you own. The fields used could be something like:

• Title
• Author
• Publisher
• Year Published
• Number of Pages
• Fiction/nonfiction
• Hardcover/paperback

With all these fields, your books could be easily sorted. Using this technique on contact lists, story ideas, sources or other sets of information will make a journalists life much easier.

Chapter one explains basic terms and concepts that are needed to work in the digital world, such as:

• bytes, or units of measure for digital information. Abbreviations , such as K, M and G, are used in place of the full size names. Never send an email with an attachment over 1 MB or you risk clogging servers. It is important to be aware of file sizes because it could effect how quickly people can download your content.
• RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Instead of searching many websites or repeating your search multiple times daily, an RSS feed will do the work for you. It is the most efficient way to consume large amounts of information. Just set up a reader, find a feed you like and add it to your reader. There are seemingly endless categories for RSS feeds.

After some terms and concepts, the chapter moves on to web design basics. Although computer code can be intimidating, learning it is very useful for anyone looking to get ahead. As Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur wrote in his blog in January 2009, “If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code.”

Web pages are simply documents created in code that are stored on computers running as Web servers. When a browser find the right page, it makes a copy of the document and builds the web page on your computer by following the instructions in the code.

Journalism Next by Mark Briggs

The book explains the steps needed to create a simple HTML page. The code writer has complete control over the layout of the entire page.

The inclusion of photos or images is important to avoid boring the viewer. To call an image into a Web page, use code to tell the browser where it can find the image you wish to use. The browser will then visit the source of the image and make a copy to use with your Web page.

There is more than one type of code that can be used to build a Web page.

• HTML was created by computer scientists for computer scientists. It does a great job of transfering information, but is less capable of designing a nice looking page.
• CSS is better for making a page that is pleasing to the eye. For example, it can be used to make small changes to templtes on a WordPress blog theme. Helpful for this class already? I think so.
• XML is a complement to HTML. It is most commonly used in RSS feeds and uses tags to describe data. This type of code is most likely not needed unless you attempt to build your own RSS feed.

Mixing HTML and CSS is useful and will greatly improve the way your webpage looks. The book also gives links for tutorials in both HTML and CSS.

HTML Tutorials

• www.j-learning.org
• http://webdesign.about.com
• www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide
• www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/tag/web_basics

CSS Tutorials

• www.w3schools.com/css
• http://webdesign.about.com
• www.csszengarden.com