The journalist's online toolkit

With just a few tools and minimum extra effort, the foreign correspondent of 2010 can appeal to multiple audiences, across multiple outlets, simultaneously and work with greater efficiency than ever before.

As foreign correspondent Harriet Sherwood pointed out earlier this week, you might be in a foreign place but the reality of the job means you're often chained to a desk. And working productively can be a problem:

"There are occasions when it feels as if I spend too much time chained to my laptop and phone, and not enough out there pursuing original and distinctive reporting. [Days of] mostly just me in my spare bedroom-turned-office trying to figure out the priorities of the day and how to use my time most productively."

A number of tools can help correspondents like Sherwood to become more productive. Tools that foster engagement and encourage the opening up of the newsgathering process at the same time. Let's look at three of them: Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter.

Google Reader

Think of this popular RSS reader as your information hub. You can subscribe to local newspapers or track keywords and fixed phrases associated with your beat from sites like Google News or Yahoo News.

I live in Rwanda and I use Google Reader to track news stories that mention Rwanda. In addition, I use it to track photos that were taken in Rwanda and uploaded to Flickr, blog posts, discussion forums, videos. I track anything potentially useful that I can extract an RSS feed from.

Set Google Reader up correctly and you'll soon find yourself opening it every morning before your email inbox or the local newspapers. And, if you have a smartphone, you can do all of this on the move.

Delicious

Think of this social bookmarking service as your mobile filing cabinet. All that searching through newspapers you do every day, stories that may not make it to broadcast but may at least spark a 'Hmm. that's interesting' moment - file them online; on Delicious. Install the Delicious bookmarklet on your browser and archiving research will never be the same again.

"I work with lots of sources, whether from RSS, Twitter or other news and information sites and Delicious is an easy way to keep track of these web links,"

says Alex Strick van Linschoten, a freelance foreign correspondent based in Kandahar.

Alex integrates his Delicious account with a number of other tools, including a service called Pinboard. "All my Delicious bookmarks are automatically synced up to Pinboard as well, since Pinboard keeps an offline archive of all links you send to it."

Twitter

Follow people where you live. Follow people who are interested in where you live. Follow academics, researchers, politicians, celebrities and NGO workers where you live. And engage with them.

"I started using Twitter as a way to promote my work but it soon became obvious that it is more powerful in the opposite direction - as a way of finding stories,"

says Daily Telegraph Pakistan correspondent Rob Crilly.

Get into the habit of tweeting links to the more interesting stories you find in your Google Reader. Link your Delicious account to your Twitter account, to simultaneously tweet interesting links when you bookmark them to Delicious. Monitor chatter about key places, people and events where you live using keyword searches on TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Like Google Reader, if you have a smartphone, install one of these tools onto it. And get into the habit of checking it.

"The people I follow have similar interests to me - Pakistan, humanitarian aid, development, South Asian politics - and make up an intelligent network rooting around in the darkest corners of the internet and pointing me in the direction of news reports, obscure academic papers and blogs that I might not otherwise have seen,"

adds Crilly.

"So from those, and from the 140-character tweets, I have found probably half a dozen or so story ideas in the past year, as well of lots of important reading."

Tuning into the local populace on Twitter comes into its own especially during breaking news. Ten grenades have exploded on five separate evenings in the Rwandan capital since February 2010. On four of those evenings, I found out about the attacks on Twitter first - on my iPhone whilst cooking dinner in my kitchen in Kigali.

Get to grips with Google Reader, Delicious and Twitter; see the benefits; and hopefully you will become more curious about what else is possible. In later posts I will look at other tools and other ways for the foreign correspondent, and other reporters, to expand their use of social media tools to do the job of journalism.