Total Community Coverage Series

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Tools: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Resources are a challenge for almost every news organization -- there are never enough skilled people (especially technical people) or enough budget to build the infrastructure or try new things or reach out to new audiences.

Basic rule of digital media: Don't build any tools from scratch if you can possibly avoid it -- and you can almost always avoid it.

Conskeptical, via Flickr (CC license)

Good thing you don't have to do it all yourself!

Your news organization can accomplish a great deal by using or partnering with existing third-party tools and services. Here are a few examples:

• Facebook and MySpace. These incredibly popular social media services offer you a chance to create your own coherent online presence in a venue where more and more segments of your community already choose to spend time. You can create your own Facebook page (to explain what you offer) or group (to engage your community), as well as interact actively with community members individually or in their groups.
  
  
• Mobile distribution. If you don't have your own system for distributing content (especially text messages) to mobile users, consider partnering with Go2 Media. (More about them.) Other options are BuzMob and Twitterfeed. Swift lets you create mobile versions of your entire site. Each service has limitations, so see what would work for you. Also, although it's more focused on business applications, Message Media might be another option.
  
  
• Twitter. Another popular social media service that delivers text-only messages, max. 140 characters. It's somewhere between a news update service, a conversation, and a blog with very short posts. Best of all, it's extremely friendly to mobile devices as well as web browsers. In October 2007, San Diego public radio station KPBS put Twitter to excellent use in its wildfire coverage.
  
  
• Blogging and forums. These can be great ways to engage your community on your site, as long as you don't have to build them from scratch on the back end. Several popular blogging tools such as WordPress and Drupal (or Typepad, and Blogger, which require few technical skills) can be integrated under your site's domain so they appear superficially to be part of your site. Also, vBulletin is a robust forum tool that offers a good user interface and can be installed quickly on your server. If your existing content management system doesn't make it easy to create blogs and forums, don't force it, and don't give up -- just use a different tool. Your community won't care about the back end.
  
  
• Interactive maps. The most basic tool to start with is Google Maps, which allows you to quickly create and update maps to support your coverage of local events and issues. You can put a "pin" anywhere on your map and include with each pin text, images, videos, links, audio, and other content. You can also create maps that allow visitors to add pins of their own. Check out the wide selection of Google Maps available at Bakersfield.com. (More cool news maps using a variety of existing tools or services.)
  
  A slightly more advanced, but incredibly popular and visually compelling interactive mapping tool is Google Earth. In this video, Leslie Rule of the Center for Locative Media explains how any news organization can use Google Earth, just like NYTimes.com is doing:

In general, when it comes to online and mobile media, there are ALWAYS options for whatever kind of content or service you want to offer. Learn that when in-house options seem scarce or nonexistent, you do have other options. Encourage your IT staff and managers to collaborate with you on finding and trying these options.

Creating a culture that values experimentation, like KPBS has done, is the most important part of moving forward with online and mobile media.

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