links for 2009-10-27

Every six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases data about newspapers and how many people subscribe to them. And then everyone writes a story about how some newspapers declined some amount over the year previous. Well, that's no way to look at data! It's confusing—and it obscures larger trends. So we've taken chunks of data for the major newspapers, going back to 1990, and graphed it, so you can see what's actually happened to newspaper circulation.

Whilst pulling together resources for video (I’m expecting the students to do a lot of reading around the basic technical stuff) I came across the Flip video spotlight site.

Adding reporters' e-mail addresses at the bottom of stories responds to frequent reader exasperation over not knowing how to contact Post journalists. But already, several readers have complained to me that reporters haven't responded to their e-mails. It's a chronic problem in newsrooms. Many busy reporters are overwhelmed by e-mails. But too many simply refuse, or are too lazy, to respond. With newspaper survival at stake, that's suicidal.

There are some tools to help you learn what people are saying about your brand:

• Cymfony is very good to search what people say about your brand.
• ViralTracker is for tracking the viral spreading of video.
• Delicious is good to find the tags of your brands.
• Tweetdeck allows you to have a quick view of what is going on in Twitter on an individual level.
• TweetFunnel allows multiple users to manage a simple Twitter account.
• Tweetmeme tracks the links that were spread around Twitter.
• Twitterfall is good to follow a certain topic. It is set up on the huge screen in the Daily Telegraph's office now.

With the help of people on Twitter, I’ve compiled the 10 alternative rules for covering magistrates courts – the things anyone, hyperlocal journalist or rookie reporter should find helpful in the quest to get the most out of court