Via Morguefile.

by Lynne Smit

For a science journalist, a blog can serve a number of purposes. It can be a way for you to publish some of the interesting information you have gathered for your story in a different way.

If you are a broadcast journalist, your personal blog may be a way to find your voice in another medium. A blog can be a way for you to build a community around your work or the issues that you feel passionate about. It can also enhance your reputation as a science journalist and drive traffic to your ‘day job’ work. It is all about adding value and broadening the story.

Here are a few pointers for blogging.

• The first rule of blogging is that it should be fun. If you are not enjoying it, then don’t bother.

• Keep it up! You need to post at least once a week to keep your blog active and your audience happy. Why not create a posting schedule, where you set aside a specific time for blog writing.

• Know what you want to say. Have a brainstorm session and write down at least 25 blog ideas before you start.

• Keep it short and sweet. Try to keep the posts at around 300 words long, and almost never more than 1000.

• Make it accessible and easy to read. Use pictures and lists and bullet points to break up the text.

• Links are important. Use links to explain complex terms or to point to other research or to broaden the story by pointing to other conversations on the same subject.

• Keep it conversational and lighter in tone than you may use in your normal publication.

• Keep it topical and relevant. If your blog is furthering your work as a science journalist, don’t include details about your church camp or your latest squeeze.

• Write posts in advance: This helps for when you are stuck for a topic or going on holiday or too busy. Most blog sites allow you to pre-schedule your posts.

• Don’t be shy. Tell everyone about your blog. Put the address on your email signature, on your business cards and if possible mention it in your stories.

• Comment on other people’s blogs: people will see your comments and click the link to find out more about you.

• Link to other blogs: When other bloggers see you’ve linked to them, they’ll check you out — and may link back.

• Write a guest post, and invite others to write for you.

• Write great content: nobody will want to read it if it is badly written or boring.

You can read more about science writing and social media in the online science journalism course of the World Federation of Science Journalists. All 10 lessons are available for free online in English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Turkish.

by Dana Liebelson

Journalists used to have to put on their boots to find sources. Now they can track them down with the click of a mouse.

Finding sources in the real world is hard enough, finding them online can be as random as flipping through a phone book.

That’s where sites offering to crowdsource experts and gather comments come in.

The five websites below offer journalists easy and free access to sources, experts and even story ideas. Time-crunched staffers and far-flung freelancers alike can benefit from finding sources and gathering news this way, especially as the sites offering to send out queries multiply.

Some allow journalists to post queries or use a high-powered search engine. In others, it’s possible to submit a deadline and a topic to the site and get sources and interview questions answered via email.

Whether you think these sites are a marvelous supplement to old school journalism or profoundly lazy - as we ask in a discussion post - they’re worth checking out.

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by Nicole Martinelli

Social media can help you do much more than connect with old friends. Here are shortcuts for journalists who want to get interviews, sources and stories using Facebook, Twitter and more. If you have more tips, please share them in the comments.

Facebook Consider opening a fan page. It will keep readers and your Aunt Mabel separate, letting you post calls for comments or your latest story without interfering with your personal life. (By the way, here’s IJNet’s fan page).

You may feel silly having a “fan” page – but even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy has one, so get over it. The fan page will allow quick updates and interaction with readers without the time suck of reading everyone’s status updates — and getting sidetracked.

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by Nicole Martinelli

Social media best practices change faster than you can tweet or “like” whatever people agreed on last week.

The idea for this piece came about while prepping IJNet’s internal social media guidelines. Our number of Twitter followers is on the rise and so many people “like” us now on Facebook we blush, but across our seven languages no editor had the same strategy. Actually, our best practices often contradicted one other. (“Don’t schedule.” “Use scheduling.” “Avoid cross posting.” “Cross post, it’s a lifesaver.”). You get the idea.

Here are some social media “rules” worth breaking. Your mileage may vary. But if you’re a journalist just getting started or struggling with social media time suck, try them out. Experimenting can’t hurt and we’re pretty sure at least they won’t get you fired.

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Covering the news used to be fairly simple. Reporters wrote things down and then sent them to editors, who then sent them to the printer to be published in the newspaper. But things are a lot more complicated now: News has become an ongoing process rather than a finished product, and it’s composed of many different pieces, including blogs and video and Twitter and so on. In a recent post at the 10,000 Words blog, Lauren Rabaino of the Seattle Times does a good job of looking at how confusing this can be for newspapers and other media entities. More than anything else, it reinforces the need to rethink how the news gets written and distributed.

As Rabaino notes in her post, the way that news stories emerge now — whether it’s a story about the Occupy Wall Street protests or an earthquake in Japan, or even a more local news piece — is different now because the germ of a story can come from anywhere: from Twitter, from a photo or a video posted to YouTube, or from a blog. As blogging pioneer Dave Winer has pointed out, the “sources can now go direct,” in the sense that anyone who is at the center of a news event has publishing tools available to them to get their own story out. This “democracy of distribution” (as Om has called it) created by Twitter and other tools changes the dynamic dramatically.

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Posted by the Diederich College of Communication

It’s no longer enough to just be a great writer; today’s well-prepared journalist must be well-versed (if not fluent) in using social media and emerging multimedia technology to gather sources and get the story out to the public. Luckily, there are some helpful resources designed to help navigate the new frontier of journalism in the digital age. Below are six must-know websites for anyone working in the profession.

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CC-licensed, courtesy of Andrew Phelps in Flickr.

by Valentina Gimenez

Good multimedia journalism requires multi-tasking journalists who are observant and flexible.

IJNet asked experienced multi-platform reporter Karla Leal about what makes a good multimedia journalist. Leal, who recently gave a presentation on multimedia journalism during Mass Communication Week at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University, is currently an anchor at Spanish-language news channel Telemundo Austin.

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by Maite Fernandez

Journalists need to go beyond Google and incorporate other search tools in their toolbox.

A range of tools are required to do the job, says Amy Webb, CEO of Webbmedia Group.

The former Wall Street Journal and Newsweek reporter offered up some underused search methods during a presentation on “Emerging Tech Trends for Academia” at the Journalism Interactive conference organized by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

To avoid information overload, Webb recommended a few tools.

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By Joe Grimm, Poynter

LinkedIn helps people get jobs, no doubt. I used it extensively to find journalists when I did some recruiting outside of my area for Patch in 2010, and friends in other fields have been contacted by headhunters who found them on LinkedIn.

To make LinkedIn work, though, you need to do more than post a resume. Recommend others, post questions, answer them, build a strong network and your visibility will rise. With visibility comes opportunity.

LinkedIn itself follows that mantra, interlacing itself more with networks such as Twitter.

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