The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook brings tips for writers and editors on how to avoid or detect journalistic plagiarism. Here are three tips I really like:
• Keep research separate from writing. Don’t copy-and-paste other people’s words and work into your draft until you’re ready to quote from it. Then…
• “Before you start to research, write. In the middle of your research, write. Expressing your own thoughts and using your own words will force your brain to flex the self-expression neurons, rather than the repetition neurons.” (Via Poynter)
• Live to link. For those producing online content, link as much as possible. This reinforces the act of attribution. For print and broadcast people, stop the silly practice of not crediting competitors. (That’s what I have been doing here in my blog!!!!!)

The article Using Free Web Designs from the Knight Digital Media Center teaches how to build your Website in Flash, how to build your site from scratch with HTML and CSS and how to modify freely available HTML + CSS templates to suit your needs, integrating Flash components as necessary etc. Is your professor also requesting you to build a website full of content and you have no idea how to do it? Here is what you need!!!! J

If you like or want to figure out what online journalism is you need to check the Searchable Databases -interactive Map – a kind of an electronic format of a community data, or in other words: an online searchable database! This article tells step-by-step how to initiate and build one!!

If you have never taken a Web or Graphic Design course here it is a hand: the article J-Learning — Plan It — News Site in a Box teaches you how to build a simple Web site using free services, to enhance your site with advanced features, to use a blog system like WordPress (this blog!!) to power your news site, how to choose a full-powered, open-source CMS for your news site and much more.

The Website Knight Citizen News Network: Helping citizens and journalists amplify community news has a practical guide for journalists have to do interviews (like me!) to how properly interview somebody. The guidelines include:

1) How interviewing can improve your community reporting.

2) How to identify what type of interviews fit your goals.

3) How to find people to talk to.

4) How to approach them and arrange an interview.

5) How to conduct productive interviews.

6) How to edit and publish an interview.

7) How to navigate ethical conundrums that can come with interviewing.

Finally “an article of the dreams” not only for journalists but also for all U.S. citizens. The KCNN: Citizen Journalists’ Guide to Open Government shows how human beings like me and you can have access to government files and records. Since “Democracies die behind closed doors” this piece proves not everything is lost!! There are 10 links of different types of government access, from State Websites to Meeting and Court’s access. You will need time to check out everything!

“Middle East Report 224: Jihadis in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam” is a Middle East Research and Information Project report article about the War on Terror in the Middle East, the Jihadis and Urban Islam . This is a concise section/part of the “Arabs, Muslims and Race in America Middle East Report 224 – Fall 2002” book.

RTNDA: Social Media and Blogging Guidelines as the name says is a Social Media Guideline. As journalists we should uphold the same professional and ethical standards of fairness, accuracy, truthfulness, transparency and independence when using social media as we do on air and on all digital news platforms. The article talks about Ethics when using Social Media websites.

In the “Pakistan’s leading news organization, and publishes the country’s leading English-language newspaper” link you can check the DAWN.COM website, a recent English News website from Pakistan with latest and breaking news stories – a destination that brings its readers content from around the world and news and information about Pakistan, in particular. Looks a very serious company and in my opinion can help Americans to access Middle East credible and unbiased content/news wrote by local serious journalists. The group also has DawnNews TV, CityFM89, e-paper and Events. They say at the website that “averaging over 10 million page views a month, and one million unique visitors with average time spent on the site in excess of 5 minutes, DAWN.COM is the first choice of news source for online audience.” “The newspaper readers from across the country and around the globe are students, travelers, business decision makers, opinion leaders and influential consumers.”

“What is a Multimedia Story? | Multimedia Storytelling | Knight Digital …” is a link for the Knight Digital Media Center where readers have access to a multimedia storytelling tool. A multimedia story is some combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a Web site in a nonlinear format in which the information in each medium is complementary. In the end of the article readers can also check the author’s website (if exists), a print more in-depth story about the topic, a telephone or online interview with the author etc.

“En la Tierra del Diego” is a multimedia work in the same line of “La Hoja Sagrada.” Very interesting visually. In “Reporteando desde la ciudad más violenta del mundo… Ciudad Juárez” or in English “Reporting from the most violent city of the world” Judith Torrea, a Spanish journalist, decided to create a blog to tell her passion and pain for City Juárez, Mexico.  There she has photos, videos and lot of information about the most violent city of the world and her impressions of how to report from and about the city. “Del papel a la web: Evolución del diseño periodístico en la red” is a 36 pages pdf document about the history and evolution of the graphic journalism in the internet. The authors Ramón Salaverría and Francisco Sancho, from Navarra University, wrote a detailed document with some illustrative pictures and examples about the topic.

I visited and tried by myself Monitter, a live twitter monitor that lets you keep an eye on the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are talking about. Monitter is really helpful when you are a researcher or need to be tuned with new tendencies and top stories. And for you (especially if you are a communicator) that will ask: “But and what is twitter?” you need to read the Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists. Because communicators need to be able to make use of every tool in their arsenal in order to stay afloat in today’s almost real-time media landscape you can’t miss this article. There you will find “The Journalist’s Guide to YouTube”, Facebook, Twitter, Video Blogging, and ways to increase engagement and influence in new communities, tips to how to be a successful reporter in the Millennial generation and check new trends for 2010.

I keep you posted with more useful info!