Mapping newspaper layoffs

Paper Cuts at graphicdesignr maps newspaper layoffs. Via Depth Reporting.

People finding

Mark Schaver at Depth Reporting has some great entries on people-finding (via Liz Donovan at Infomaniac).

Court directories

The National Center for State Courts links to state and local courts in each
state, and provides organizational charts showing the court structure for each state.

Awesome highlighter

Awesome Highlighter is
a nifty tool that lets you highlight selected text on a web page and then save the url of the highlighted
page to share with others, or save just the highlights.

Why twitter?

Do you twitter? From the frontline has the Top 10 Journalistic Uses for Twitter. Also see this list of newspapers that twitter, and Why twitter matters to newspaper editors and reporters.

Google maps

A couple of cool gadgets on Google Maps: Explore this area shows you photos and videos of an area. And street view shows you street level photos of a place, like on this map of Miami. All the streets outlined in blue are available in street view.

Shrinky links

Shrink those long, cumbersome web links with Metamark. Metamark not only shortens a link to something that’s easier to paste into an email, but it also lets you customize the new link name. TinyURL is another tool you can use to shorten urls, and other link shrinking tools are discussed here.

Translation

There are lots of web sites that translate from one language to another (this and this and this), but WordReference.com also offers forums where you can ask native speakers of various languages about idioms, grammar, specialized terminology, etc.

Carnival of Journalism

From the Carnival of Journalism website:

We are a group of bloggers who enjoy writing about journalism and related topics. We thought we would club together and set up this carnival. For those unfamiliar with blog carnivals check out Wikipedia’s definition.

This month’s topic is especially interesting: What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

Finding cities in counties

Need to know what county a particular city is in? Use this handy reference tool from the National Association of Counties. You can also find out the name and position of local elected officials and other county stats.