Author: Danny Sanchez

Danny Sanchez is the Audience Development Manager at Tribune's Sun-Sentinel.com and OrlandoSentinel.com. Danny has been with Tribune since 2005 in a variety of editorial, digital and product development roles in Hartford, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. He has also previously worked in the newsrooms of the Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald.

The Globe and Mail’s best business blogs list

The business journalists at the Globe and Mail have put together a fantastic list of their 30 favorite business blogs. This is definitely a list to share with your business staff (I just did). You should also view Business blog for your staff. However, now I’m looking for other hand-edited blog lists put together by objective pros. Do you know of any good lists of this sort in the entertainment, lifsetyle, sports and other major newspaper categories? [Globe and Mail: Best of the [Financial] Blogs] [Tip o’ the hat to Cyberjournalist. Photo by DavidDMuir]. You will ge the best info here at business history.

Overcome evil article pagination with Firefox add-on

Hard-core news junkies hate it. Matt Drudge hates it. You surely hate it too: article pagination. This:

Some folks have learned to hit that “Print” button to get just the text. However, other sites just call a printer stylesheet. Lucky for you, Firefox has a nifty plug-in called Repagination that lets you stitch together all those separate pages into one long document.

Just right-click on the pagination links, trigger the repagination plug-in and voila!

You get to read by just scrolling. The advertising department still gets to serve ads on those pages. We can all get along, can’t we?

[Firefox Repagination plugin via Lifehacker]

Webby Award winners announced (with news organization list)

Just announced: 2008’s Webby Award winners! The Webby Awards picks through the best of the Web and grants awards in more categories than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve pored through the list and extracted the winners from news-related categories, as well as news organizations that won in other categories, such as science or best practices. Here’s the Journalistopia-edited list. Apologies in advance if I missed anyone:

Best Copy/Writing
Wired.com
http://www.wired.com
(Also nominated: HowStuffWorks, Design Observer, NYTimes.com and Slate)

Best Use of Photography
Your Shot – National Geographic Magazine
http://ngm.com/yourshot

Blog – Business
FT.com Alphaville
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/

Blog – Political
The Huffington Post
http://huffingtonpost.com

Broadband
ABC.com Full Episode Player
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streami…

Magazine
National Geographic Magazine Online
http://ngm.com
(Also nominated: Dwell.com, Makezine, NYMag, Yoga Journal Yoga Journal)

Music
BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
http://agencyrepublic.net/awards/…

News
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: BBC News, Wired, CNN and Discovery News)

Newspaper
NYTimes.com
http://nytimes.com/
(Also nominated: The Guardian, the Independent, the Wall Street Journal and Variety)

Radio
BBC World Service channel site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/

Science
nature.com
http://www.nature.com

Sports
Yahoo! Sports
http://sports.yahoo.com/
(Also nominated: ESPN.com, Nike Skateboarding, Spyker F1 Magazine, Sweet Spots)

Television
HBO Voyeur
http://www.hbovoyeur.com

VIDEO CATEGORIES

Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics
The New York Times/T: The New York TImes Style Magazine “Circle Squared”
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/20…

Best Writing
Onion News Network
http://tv.theonion.com

Documentary: Individual Episode
Coney Island: An Uncertain Future
Getty Images
http://www.rickgershon.com/gettyi…

News and Politics: Individual Episode
Finding the Way Home
MediaStorm
http://mediastorm.org/0017.htm

Travel (video)
Frugal Traveler: American Road Trip – NYTimes.com/Video
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_s…

MOBILE

Entertainment (mobile)
Cosmo Mobile: 100 Hot Cities, Fake Calls, Dude Decoder & Cocktails!
http://m.cosmopolitan.com

Listing and Updates (mobile)
The New York Times Mobile Real Estate Listings
http://m.nytimes.com/re

News (mobile)
Mobile NYTimes
http://mobile.nytimes.com

Sports (mobile)
ESPN.com (Wireless)
http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wire…

ALSO: Shoutouts to NYTimes.com for their best practices and best visual design/function nominations, Mama Trib’s Swamp blog for best political blog nomination, National Geographic for their best home page People’s Voice award, Consumer Reports for their Guides/Ratings/Review People’s Voice award, the Guardian and Onion for their podcasts nominations, NPR for their politics nomination, NPR and the BBC for their religion and spirituality nominations, Frontline World for their Documentary: Series and Documentray: Individual nominations, U.S. News and World Report for their Best Writing (video) nomination, the New Yorker’s animated cartoons for their animation nomination, CBS for their sports (video) nomination and many more.

Yep, no news site nominees in the navigation and structure categories. We’ll have to work on that…

The best time to strike with blog posts

A Connecticut software developer has analyzed 10,000 postings on social networking sites to determine the best and worst times to publish a blog post.

The best times, according to developer Jake Luciani’s work: between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. (Pacific Time) and between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, with Thursday being the best day.

This is a definite must-share factoid for the bloggers at your organization (if you can pry them away from lunch, that is).

More details about how he came to the conclusion here and here.

[Photo by Leo Reynolds]

Associated Press launches iPhone news service

From the Associated Press: The AP and more than 100 of its member newspapers are launching a service today that will make news stories available on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and other mobile devices.

Among the publishers participating in the service: Advance Publications Inc., Hearst Corp., Lee Enterprises Inc., McClatchy Co., MediaNews Group Inc. and Rust Communications Inc.

I’d review the service, but yours truly still uses this old thing… sigh.

Getcher angry journalist t-shirts!

T-Shirt: Journalists get laid (off)I’ve got to give big credit to Kiyoshi Martinez for giving psychological relief to an entire industry. Not only has the AngryJournalist.com gripe board taken off, but now Martinez is selling some of the most hilarious journo shirts ever made.

But of course, most of the shirts are reminiscent of Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more” rant in ‘Network’.

Angry ink-stained wretch shirts here.

[Tip ‘o the hat to Gannett Blog.]

Instamatically download, combine newspaper front page PDFs

Newspaper page fronts

37Signals today highlighted an uber-useful Mac OS X Automator script that pings the Newseum’s repository of newspaper front PDFs and combines them into a single PDF for your viewing pleasure.

If that doesn’t make printing out and talking trash about your competitors’ A1 choices at the daily news meeting a breeze, I don’t know what does!

[37Signals – Newseum Automator script]

Guide to surviving journalism as a high-tech industry

Lisa Williams has written what may be one of the best posts about how to adapt to an increasingly technology-driven journalism world.

Lisa, the Placeblogger founder who has a foot planted in both media and technology worlds, impressed the heck out of me at the ONA conference in Toronto when she illustrated how journalism is becoming a high-tech industry. Now I know you’re thinking right now: “Well, I already know we’re becoming high-tech,  Danny. I’m always looking around for new web tools I can use for our site.”

However, journalism becoming a “high-tech industry” doesn’t simply mean we’re using the latest gizmos and knick-knacks to deliver news. It means we’re experiencing a fundamental change in our values, culture and business practices — changes that are more pervasive than you may initially realize. Check out Lisa’s post for some prescient advice on how to deal with it.

[Lisa Williams: Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry]

The case for using Twitter

Technology columnist and Sentinel coworker-o’-mine Etan Horowitz outlines on his blog how and why journalists should start using Twitter.

Etan writes:

“If you are a technology journalist, you need to start using Twitter. And regardless of what you cover, you should sign up for Twitter. It’s where the people you cover are hanging out and communicating and it will help you build sources, promote yourself, get story ideas and keep your finger on the pulse of the community you cover.”

Etan’s post follows a post by Charles Cooper on CNET about how journalists haven’t taken to Twitter.

Here in Orlando, I, along with the breaking news staff, are the keepers of the Orlando Sentinel Twitter feed. Twitter has been a great opportunity to reach a new, tech-savvy audience and provide a service that many folks tell me is valuable to them. Besides, where else could you get away with rickrolling readers on April 1? (See: “ Family of manatees discovered in Lake Eola”)