Jen Lee Reeves

I started this list when I spoke to students at a high school journalism conference on how it is possible to do everything you need as a journalist by using free products. Since then, this list continues to grow! It can be helpful for anyone trying to do good journalism on a tight budget.

(Click here you’re looking for Twitter Tips)

Blog/Website

Weebly – A free website building tool
Yola – Another free website building tool
Jimdo – Another free website building tool
Google Sites – A free website building tool
Wix – A free website building tool using Flash
Blogger – Simple way to blog
WordPress – A blog and static webpage product
MovableType – A downloadable blog system
Blogsome – More blogging
Livejournal – Blogging with a social community
Tumblr – A combination of Twitter and blogging
Posterous – A simple way to share thoughts and links
MSN Spaces – Another community blogging product
Vox – Nice clean designs for blogs
Kompozer – A web design tool that does a lot of things Dreamweaver does (but for free)

Audio Editing/Podcasting

Audacity – Free audio editing tool (needs to download LameLib to create MP3 files)
MyPodcast.com – Free podcast hosting tool
1 Pixel Out – A WordPress plug in you can use to embed audio into your website (you need server space). Mindy McAdams created a tutorial on how to make that work.

Video Sharing/Editing

YouTube – Everyone uses it and it’s available for use on WordPress.com and you can create a channel for your content
Vimeo – Beautiful, clean video player
Motionbox – Clean video player, offers a video editing tool
Photobucket – Free place to store video
Viddler – Nice video player and you can comment on the video
Tubemogul – Upload your video EVERYWHERE!

Video Streaming

Justin.tv – One of the first free streaming services
Mogulus – Lets you produce as simple or as complicated a webcast you want (you can even have multiple cameras)
Ustream – Another popular and reliable multi-camera tool (And there’s a really popular puppy cam)
Blip.tv – Another nice option for streaming video

Video Conversion

MPEG Streamclip
Prism
Handbrake (for Macs)
WinFF (for PCs)
ffmpegx (for Macs)

MediaFork (DVD to MP4 for Macs)

Zamzar – an online conversion tool that will seriously convert almost anything

Photo Sharing/Editing

Flickr – Professional storage and free editing tool (size limit) – has a social community
Photobucket – Free place to store photos
Picasa – Photo storage (works directly with Blogger and all other Google Tools) and photo editing
Photoshop Express - Just like Photoshop image editing but online
Picnik – A handy and popular way to edit photos online and add fun elements.
Mashable created this page with even more photo editors.

Multimedia

Vuvox - Create a multimedia collage and embed it to your site.

Document Sharing/Collaborating

Google Documents – Create content and work on it from anywhere with Internet. Good for collaborating.
Basecamp - Collaborate content, deadlines, messages and content. Basic version is free.
Google Groups – Collaborate content, deadlines, messages and content.

Social Networking

Ning – Set up your own social network with ease
Flock – A web browser that makes it easy to follow all of your social networks
Twitter – A microblog that lets you connect socially and share links and information in a concise way
Twhirl – A tool that lets you Twitter with more than one account
Twitter Search – Follow Twitter themes by searching keywords
Utterli – Share audio updates to your site
MySpace – Old school social networking
Facebook – Many opportunities to promote your news product here

File Sharing
Getdropbox – Share files big and small without worrying about file size

Social Link Sharing
Digg – Share links and discuss
Social Median – Similar sharing but also community and theme based link sharing
del.icio.us – Bookmark and share links
StumbleUpon – Discover links that fit your interest
Magnolia – Another spot to share and learn about links

Content Management Systems
(let’s get complicated here)
Django – many newspaper websites are built on this open source system
Drupal – many other news and information sites are built using this open source system
Joomla – another powerful open source CMS that is used by many news and information organizations.

Check out this incredible visual display of social networks and what they do.

Feel free to email me more links and ideas: jenleereeves (at) gmail (dot) com or @jenleereeves on Twitter.