Getting Down and Practical

I love practical tips for multimedia journalists and other media makers to help us get our arms around the personal media revolution without costing us a fortune. At the session "Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap," Dale Steinke of KING TV pointed to a wealth of online resources: "Trumba.com":http://www.trumba.com is a powerful public events calendar. Put 5 lines of codes on your site and you've got a community calendar. He pointed to "Videozilla":http://www.videozilla.net/, which, at $30, is an inexpensive alternative to Flash ($700) for video conversion. Want to put supertitles scrolling across the bottom of your videos? "Our IT dept said it would cost $12,000 to support supers," he said. Steinke found an alternative, "Harris Inscriber":http://www.broadcast.harris.com/inscriber/, based in Canada, that costs $50. "Type in your text and you're good to go." Wow! For photo editing, he said he prefers Paint Shop Pro ($70) to Photoshop ($630) or Photoshop Elements ($80-$90). Lots of free great applications and plug-ins are available at "download.com":http://www.download.com/, "pcmag":http://www.pcmag.com/, "tucows ":http://www.tucows.com/and "pc world":http://www.pcworld.com/. Instead of manging your project with Microsoft Project ($400), an inexpensive alternative is "Basecamp":http://www.basecamphq.com/, free for one project. John Havens of "BlogTalkRadio":http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ held up his ultra-cool iFlip. It costs $110 and records 30 minutes of digital video. Just record some video, use the USB port to connect to your Mac or PC, and upload to your favorite website. I've been dabbling in this space for years and picked up a few tricks. Love that.