The opportunities for telling stories across a variety of online platforms are greater than ever before. Free curation tools like Storify and Tumblr are being taken up by student, freelance, local and national newspaper journalists alike, as are free data visualisation platforms such as Tableau.

Liveblogging platforms like ScribbleLive and CoveritLive have been used by both new and traditional media as the differences between the two begin to disappear, as are the more established tools that we might take for granted, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Flickr.

In session 2A at news:rewired we’ll be looking at the ways journalists can take advantage of these tools, to break out of relying on the standard article format for news and features, and when and for what stories they are most appropriate. When should you curate other people’s content? When should you liveblog? When should you create a audio slideshow, visualisation, or video package?

The session features Xavier Damman, co-founder, Storify, Adam Westbrook, online video journalist, lecturer and blogger, Stephen Abbott, executive producer, Guardian; Andy Cotgreave, senior product consultant, Tableau Software.

Here are some related links ahead of the session to get you thinking.

Journalism.co.uk: ‘Why are we just doing static things?’: Burt Herman talks dynamic storytelling with Storify
Storify founder Burt Herman talks to Journalism.co.uk about why installing a social media editor to run the Twitter account while everyone else carries on as normal is not enough

Stanford University: A series of videos on using data visualisation in storytelling
This excellent eight-part series interviews some of the people on the cutting edge of data visualisation to produce a great introduction and guide to how to tell stories with data

Alfred Hermida: A cheatsheet on multimedia stories
A step-by-step guide from collaborative journalism wiz Alfred Hermida on how and when to bring in a variety of tools and members of staff on covering a story.

Adam Westbrook: Six original ways to use online video
Panellist Adam Westbrook looks at six examples of innovative use of video online

Journalism.co.uk: Five of the best Tumblr news blogs
We round of five of the best examples we’ve seen of news sites using curation and blogging platform Tumblr in their coverage

Nieman: New York Times joins with YouTube and Storyful for 9/11 video reflections
Nieman Journalism Lab catches the New York Times in collaboration mode ahead of the 9/11 anniversary, teaming up with YouTube and Storyful to gather and share users’ reflections on the attacks and the meaning of the ten years that have passed since.

news:rewired: Ten free collaboration tools for Journalists
Tips from the news:rewired site on some of the best free tools to enhance collaboration with others.

Find below presentations from Session 2B – Social media strategy.

The session featured Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development, the Independent; Stefan Stern, director of strategy, Edelman; Mark Jones, global communities editor, Reuters News; Mark Johnson, community editor, the Economist and Suw Charman-Anderson, social technologist.

Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development, the Independent

Mark Jones, global communities editor, Reuters News

Mark Johnson, community editor, the Economist

Here are the presentations from Session 1A – ‘The data journalism toolkit’, at last week’s news:rewired conference.

The session featured:Professor Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University and founder, helpmeinvestigate.com; Alastair Dant, lead interactive technologist, the Guardian; Federica Cocco, editor, OWNI.eu; Conrad Quilty-Harper, data reporter, the Telegraph. Moderated by Simon Rogers; editor, Guardian datablog and datastore.

Paul Bradshaw, visiting professor, City University, London

Federica Cocco, editor, OWNI.eu

http://owni.eu/2011/05/25/a-map-to-freedom-the-internet-in-europe/
http://influencenetworks.org/
http://owni.fr/2011/04/18/carte-biens-mal-acquis-kadhafi-ben-ali/
http://wikileaks.owni.fr/
http://app.owni.fr/warlogs/
http://warlogs.owni.fr/
http://statelogs.owni.fr/
http://owni.eu/2011/03/04/app-fortress-europe-a-deadly-exodus/

Conrad Quilty-Harper, data mapping reporter, the Telegraph

Alastair Dant, lead interactive technologist, the Guardian

See the full session on video

Here are the presentations from Session 1A – ‘The data journalism toolkit’, at last week’s news:rewired conference.

The session featured:

Kevin Anderson, data journalism trainer and digital strategist; James Ball, data journalist, Guardian investigations team ; Martin Stabe, interactive producer, FT.com. Simon Rogers; editor, Guardian datablog and datastore. Moderated by David Hayward, head of journalism programme, BBC College of Journalism.

Kevin Anderson, digital strategist

James Ball, data journalist, the Guardian

Martin Stabe, interactive producer, Financial Times

Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian datablog and datastore

Some URLs and a presentation from Simon Rogers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/may/22/nato-libya-data-journalism-operations-country
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/may/23/libya-nato-bombing-no-fly-zone
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/71679.htm
http://prezi.com/0czlhbezibbj/data-journalism-workflow/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/oct/23/wikileaks-iraq-deaths-map
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/may/19/ethnic-breakdown-england-wales

See our speakers and delegates from news:rewired – beyond the story, 16 December 2010, in the slideshow below.

For presentations from the day subscribe to our presentations category and the same for videos, which can be found in a category at this link.

Courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism, we’ve got video footage from all of our sessions at news:rewired – beyond the story, 16 December 2010.

We’ll be grouping the video clips by session – you can view all footage by looking at the video category on this site.

Joanna Geary

Courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism, we’ve got video footage from all of our sessions at news:rewired – beyond the story, 16 December 2010.

We’ll be grouping the video clips by session – you can view all footage by looking at the video category on this site.

Ed Walker

Neil Perkin

Anthony Thornton

Courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism, we’ve got video footage from all of our sessions at news:rewired – beyond the story, 16 December 2010.

We’ll be grouping the video clips by session – you can view all footage by looking at the video category on this site.

Martin Moore

Martin Belam

Simon Rogers

Silver Oliver

news:rewired is almost upon us and it looks like it’s going to be a very exciting day. But if you can’t make it, fear not. We’ll be filming, blogging and liveblogging all day.

On the liveblog, we have two of the industrious Wannabe Hacks, Matt and Nick, who will be using dedicated live blogging platform ScribbleLive on the news:rewired blog. You’ll find individual posts for each of the sessions appearing as the session starts. You can see the full agenda here.

On the cameras we have BBC College of Journalism, who will be posting clips from the all sessions on the news:rewired blog and YouTube over the course of the day. BBC CoJo will also be posting full-length footage on their own site next week.

And blogging for us tomorrow we have freelance journalist Rosie Niven, look out for her thoughts on the news:rewired blog.

If you were in the conference hall for news:rewired‘s sessions earlier in the day, you will have heard from several publishers and experts that niche works: restricting editorial coverage to an interest, area or industry and building a real community is a sound publishing strategy.

So what comes next? What works? Here are some snapshot views to round off the news:rewired day….

Permanently out of office

Hannah Waldram, one of the Guardian’s first “beatbloggers” covering Cardiff for the Guardian Local, spoke about how she runs her one-woman, officeless Cardiff blogging empire. In terms of hardware: laptop, smartphone, small digital camera and audio recorder pretty much covers it.

As for software and news sources, Waldram uses Google Reader, Twitter, live video streaming service Bambuser, live-blogging tool Cover it Live, audio editing software Audacity, Audioboo, Scribd… the list goes on. All of these are free, online, connected tools that were unthinkable a few years ago but are now becoming a standard part of the digital journalist’s armoury.

Playing the news game

Phillip Trippenbach, an interactive producer and games designer, has an idea that sounds odd to some, but he also has a compelling argument to go with it: “Video games are the future of journalism,” he declared, to a somewhat sceptical crowd.

As it stands, news is constructed into “stories” but “stories have problems – for a story you need a narrative, you need a location, you need facts.”

He mentioned Budget Hero, a game built by American Public Media that puts players in the shoes of the US government and challenges them to draw up a mini financial plan (play it here). “It’s built on the data that’s available from the US Treasury every year. You want to know how the budget works? OK you balance it.”

This is not as trival an argument as it might at first sound. Newspapers and freedom of speech campaigners have met success in getting governments to release data. So how do you then present it? A really big table? Or how about something different…

It’s important for us to realise that games are a medium just like text and pictures. As complex data sets become more and more available, the interactivity around it becomes more important – video games are a great way of doing that.

Innovate or die!

Kevin Anderson, who recently left the Guardian to go freelance after holding several senior digital roles there, added a vote of confidence to Trippenbach’s games argument, saying: “As long as the atomic unit of journalism is the story, then we are missing many commercial opportunities.”

Someone that knows a thing or two about how to make innovation work in newsrooms, Anderson warns editors and publishers to be wary of anyone that thinks there’s an easy way out of the problems that news titles face. “There’s no easy answer – anyone that tells you that, fire them. Or just don’t hire them. But there are easy wins.

“It’s 2010, we should be a lot further along then we are now… In 2008 (during the US presidential election), for most of the time my main newsgathering tool was my phone.” He adds that his reports and tweets while covering that campaign were geo-tagged, something still not standard across the industry.

But it’s not just about journalists, he says: “The lack of innovation is not just in the newsroom it’s also in the commercial department. The FT is doing some of the most innovative commercial stuff around – like a daypass to go behind the paywall given away through Foursquare check-ins.

“The economic imperative is there but where is the innovation… too many times it’s about ‘who owns the future’. We still have a culture internally that says ‘if I don’t own this, we won’t do it.’ If we don’t get past this news organisations will die.”