Link of the Week: Convert-Me
In an earlier entry, I recommended Yahoo’s online “precision tool” for converting foreign currencies. Today’s Link of the Week is more of a Swiss Army Knife for converting any kind of quantity into another. There are several of these conversion sites available on the web, but among those I’ve tried, Convert-Me has the most different measurement systems listed: weight, distance, length, volume, area, temperature, cooking measures, power, flow, speed, and on and on. It’s possible that another site I use, ConvertIt.com, might have even more different measures. But it requires you to specify the input and, optionally, output measures in a more free-form kind of...
Link of the Week: Journalists’ Ethics AdviceLine
Normally in this space, I share a research link that I know, love, and use a lot. But this week, I’m offering a link I’ve never had to use, so far. Someday, I expect I will… but not too soon, I hope. It’s the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists, sponsored by the Chicago Headline Club Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. Here’s how they describe the service on the website: The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists is a free service limited to professional journalists in need of guidance on reaching ethical decisions while covering the news....
Link of the Week: Box Office Mojo
When writing a story about a movie, it’s often useful to know box office figures. There are several websites that provide this information. My favorite is Box Office Mojo. The site includes not only the daily, weekend and weekly domestic grosses and theater counts for movies currently in theaters, but also historical box office data (including all-time rankings) for thousands of films going back decades.
World Time on your desktop
In an earlier entry, I mentioned that I also keep track of time around the world using a desktop application. Before I forget to name it, here it is. It’s called, cleverly, World Time 6, and it’s full-featured freeware from Pawprint.net. In addition to letting you set up a floating bar with the correct time for as many time zones as screen real estate will allow, World Time also includes repeating alarms, countdown clocks, a stopwatch, and a time calculator. It works very well for me, but a few cautions are in order. PawPrint.net is just a hardworking guy in British Columbia. While he has...
Links of the Week: Which county is that in?
Once in a while, you need to know which county a city is in (for example, because you need to call the county sheriff on a crime story), or conversely, which cities are in a particular county. One sometimes-handy tool for this is a Google maps mashup at maps.huge.info/county.htm. (Maps.huge.info also has a host of other useful data mapping tools: telephone area code boundaries, zip code boundaries, city boundaries, geocoders and reverse-geocoders) The only shortcoming to maps.huge.info’s county boundaries is that you must either already know the zip code of the county you’re looking for, or click in precisely the right location on a map...
Link of the Week: WorldTimeServer.com
Because Sirius OutQ News covers a lot of international LGBT news, we have stringers all over the world, and I constantly need to know what time it is where my correspondents are (don’t want to be ringing the phone in Melbourne at 3 a.m!). One of the tools I use to figure out the complications of calculating the time elsewhere (time zones, the international date line, daylight savings time) is WorldTimeServer.com. (I also use a piece of desktop software for my most commonly used time zones. More on that in a later entry.) WorldTimeServer provides the correct time anywhere in the world, taking daylight time,...
Link of the Week: U.S. Military Ranks
I was never in the military (duh), so I find military ranks and insignia somewhat confusing — and they come up in OutQ News stories pretty often, because of gays in the military. Fortunately, there’s a handy website that not only shows all the ranks in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, in order, with their insignia, with officer ranks color-coded… it also provides their pay grade and puts it all in a tabular format so you can compare the ranks across services. It’s all on one convenient page of a website aimed at fans of Tom Clancy novels, movies, etc.: The Tom...
Link of the Week: glbtq, the encyclopedia of gay culture
My job occasionally calls for research into a gay cultural topic. My first go-to source is always glbtq.com. This site bills itself as “the largest Web site devoted to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (glbtq) education and culture, (housing) the largest, most comprehensive encyclopedia of glbtq culture in the world.” Headquarted in Chicago, glbtq.com is most definitely not a wiki, but rather a genuine, edited encyclopedia, with more than 2,000 signed entries, and a editorial board of eminent gay academics.
Link of the Week: Yahoo! Currency Converter
Whenever you report a specific amount of money, you should always convert it to the currency your audience uses. Because I cover international gay news, I’m constantly having to convert foreign currency amounts to U.S. dollars. There are many, many online tools for this, but my favorite is the Yahoo! Currency Converter. By default, Yahoo’s tool converts Dollars to Japanese Yen, but this is not something I often need to do. But you can easily set the link you bookmark to your preferred default conversion. Just perform the desired default conversion and save that link. Now each time you click the link, it’ll be set...
Link of the Week: Economist Country Briefings
Whenever I need a quick, authoritative summary of a country’s political, economic and social system, I turn to the Country Briefings at Economist.com. In addition to a listing of recent The Economist articles on the country, these briefings include a factsheet, economic data on the country, a short history of the nation, and summary descriptions of the country’s political and economic system. Not every country in the world is covered, but the 80 or so largest are.
Link of the Week: Newscript.com
Each week, I’m going to offer up one of the many web sites I’ve found over the years to assist me in research, fact-checking, or writing. Some will be gems you’ve never seen or heard of. Others will be commonplace sites everybody goes to, but for which I’ve found a special use or hidden feature that I’ll share. For my inaugural ‘Link of the Week,’ here’s one of the best all-around websites offering guidance on radio newswriting and delivery: Newscript.com The site is written and maintained by Ohio radio newsman Michael Meckler. It’s a tribute to the good, old fashioned broadcast newswriting values of clarity,...