Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About software

Check out my online news toolbox

I finally finished a basic Tools page to start a list of some of the basic, mostly-free, mostly-embeddable applications that I recommend for quick and simple Web production.
It’s not intended to be all-encompassing; it’s just a short list of things I find useful.  You might find them useful, too.
But if you have any suggestions for [...]

Dealing with the elephant: Build the software you need, then sell it.

This is the fourth post in a short series I’m pretty much done with about the business model for online news before I go back to my usual routine of pointing out the obvious to people wearing dark glasses.  The starting point, the givens in the equation, are listed here.  Suggest which windmill I should [...]

Modernize your newsroom today

Many employees at news organizations have a very easy time blaming out-of-date computers, front-end print publishing systems, and Web content management systems on such faceless, amorphous entities as “Corporate,” or perhaps “The Budget.”
Nevertheless, there are plenty of free or not-completely-expensive ways you can modernize your newsroom today.
Here are 5.

Use Google Documents (or any one of [...]

Five ways to innovate today

A colleague looking for a few new ways to integrate free Web services into his newsroom asked me to chip in with a list of five, so here they are. A note to student journalists: These are all free and easy ways to get something new and different online, and they probably serve a [...]

Dream software package for online news: Your answers

Last week, out of curiosity — and the need to hand in a list to IT folks at work — I asked for your suggestions for software-that-costs-money for an online news PC.
Here’s the list I started with:

Photoshop
Flash
Dreamweaver
SoundSlides

Here’s what you added:

For image editing: Fireworks or Aperture or Lightroom
For graphics: Illustrator for 2D; Lightwave, Maya or 3D [...]