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Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK’s best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she’s married to Kevin.

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Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson is a freelance journalist and digital strategist with more than a decade of experience with the BBC and the Guardian. He has been a digital journalist since 1996 with experience in radio, television, print and the web. As a journalist, he uses blogs, social networks, Web 2.0 tools and mobile technology to break news, to engage with audiences and tell the story behind the headlines in multiple media and on multiple platforms.

From 2009-2010, he was the digital research editor at The Guardian where he focused on evaluating and adapting digital innovations to support The Guardian’s world-class journalism. He joined The Guardian in September 2006 as their first blogs editor after 8 years with the BBC working across the web, television and radio. He joined the BBC in 1998 to become their first online journalist outside of the UK, working as the Washington correspondent for BBCNews.com.

And, yes, he’s married to Suw.

E-mail Kevin.

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Dark Blogs Case Study

Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group

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Monday, January 5th, 2009

Wish list for better tools for journalism

Posted by Kevin Anderson

I still like Twhirl for my personal Twitter-ing and Twibble for my mobile Twitter-ing, but I think TweetDeck is a stellar tool for Twitter power users including journalists. I keep it open on my desktop and occasionally look at the tag cloud from TwitScoop. Recently, I saw ‘Bethesda’ pop up in huge type on the tag cloud, and I was baffled as to why this Washington DC suburb should be spiking on Twitter. But the tweets linked to the story about a huge water main break in Bethesda 20 minutes before it aired on British TV news networks.

When I showed TweetDeck to one of our news bloggers here at the Guardian, he said he wished that the news wires worked like that.

  • Why don’t we have a tag cloud showing rising stories in wire feeds?
  • Why don’t we create our own in house Adobe Air apps that automatically aggregate based on those tags from social media sources?
  • Why aren’t our publishing tools as fast and user-friendly as blogging tools?

In 2009, I see almost endless opportunities to use third party sites, applications and services to do social media journalism. My wish list will drive the apps and services I use. What’s your wish list for 2009? What tool do you use outside of your office that you wish you had inside your newsroom to do journalism?

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Innovation, Journalism, Media 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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2 Responses to “Wish list for better tools for journalism”

  1. Dan Says:
    January 5th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    1. Newswriting software with an integrated geotagging interface;
    2. Word processing software that tracks what I’m writing and searches archives and/or web for related items in real time so that facts and citations are always at my fingertips;
    3. A customizable Twitter-alert Zeitgeist tool that pops up on my screen when any significant Twitter trend develops (would be a great way of catching a meme or a breaking news story, or of just identifying what news has caught people’s attention).

  2. Elena Says:
    January 5th, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    This is a great post! Thanks for putting it together. I hope journalism evolves and new tools get introduced, like you said. My wish list would also include a geographical twitter cloud, since media are often city, country, or community-bound.