Thinking about creating an iPad app for your newsroom? Want to see what other news media have come up with? Below are screengrabs of several news apps from newspapers, magazines radio, television, and online-only news websites. Click the thumbnails to view the full-sized images.

ABC News

BBC News

CNN

Elle US

Entertainment Weekly

Forbes

Financial Times

Huffington Post

MTV News

New York Post

New York Times

NPR

USA Today

The Washington Post

Esquire

If you’re looking for an example of what’s possible on the iPad platform, check out Esquire’s iPad app. The app has an intuitive interface and seamlessly blends video content alongside print offerings — something unique for a traditionally print publication. The app also features interactive features and graphics that respond to the reader’s touch.

Eighty-two percent of American adults have cell phones, though just 4 percent of adults used their phones to monitor election results during this past midterm election cycle, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

The number of adults with mobile devices has fluctuated between 73 percent in April 2006 and 85 percent in April 2009 and September 2010, according to the survey.

The study found that of the 82 percent of adults with cell phones, 71 percent use their phone for texting, while a much smaller 39 percent use their phones to access the Internet.

The most popular election-related activity on mobile devices? Telling others they had voted, which 14 percent of respondents with phones said they did.

Interestingly, just 10 percent of respondents used their phones to inform others about voting conditions, delays, long lines and voter turnout at their polling place.

News organizations which attempted to crowdsource voting problems — The Washington Post’s vote monitor a notable example — seemed to get relatively small responses. This study provides hard numbers as to why there was such low response.

A total of 2,257 adults participated in the survey, which was conducted between Nov. 3 and Nov. 24 and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

Traveling just got a bit more awesome thanks to new technology and tools.

Foursquare and Gowalla have made a big splash when it comes to location-based information and Yelp has revolutionized real-life travel with its online and mobile offerings, but there is even more innovation on the horizon when it comes to travel and journalism. Here are some of the latest offerings that are making the world just a bit smaller.

When it comes to travel do you have Italian tastes but a Branson budget? Thanks to interactive panoramas you can visit exotic locales around the world without leaving your home or office. For example, check out this 360° view of London or this immersive interactive of the Sistine Chapel.

Creating interactive panoramas used to mean trotting out pricey equipment, but now you can create with them with the internal controls built into newer DSLR cameras or using photo stitching software. You can also use mobile apps like the recently released 360 Panorama, available from the iTunes store for 99 cents.

If you’re more interested in fine art than the locales that contain them, you can view artwork up close and personal via similar technology. Halta Definizione allows you to view famous works like DaVinci’s The Last Supper or Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in an interactive environment that allows you to zoom in to the tiniest detail.

A similar effect can be created using tools like Zoom.it which lets anybody embed high-resolution images that have similar zoom and pan controls.

Reinventing the travel experience isn’t limited to fine art: a new crop of apps and websites let you view the history all around you. The Museum of London’s Streetmuseum app pins historic photos onto the real life locations where they were taken. The app uses augmented reality to layer the photos on top of the image seen through the iPhone camera.

Historypin is taking a similar approach by inviting users to add historic photos to an interactive Google map. The result is almost 30,000 photos and stories that can be browsed by anyone.

Slate proved back in 2005 that podcasts could be much more than audio news stories with its Unauthorized Audio Tours of New York City museums. Instead of listening to the prepackaged audio tour provided by many museums, you can instead listen to culture critic Lee Siegel describe and comment on the museum’s offerings. The idea is still relatively untapped among newsrooms, despite its incredible simplicity.

A more recent trend among museums, tour guides, and other non-journalism outfits is to produce their own mobile apps that act as an official guide to a single or various points of interest. The Museum of Natural History in New York, for example, offers an app that includes GPS tracking, detailed information on exhibits, and bookmarking features.

If the various predictions are correct (and they are), we will not only see a growth in mobile applied to journalism, but also travel journalism in particular.

If you’re looking for additional ways to make your travel plans fun, easier, or more interesting, check out this list of ten smartphone travel apps.

As a proud recent pilot tester for the Google Chrome Notebook, I’ve switched over to the device as my primary laptop and have thus been consuming more and more news through the web apps in the Google Chrome Web app store.

Because Chrome web apps have yet to be adopted at a mass consumer level, it’s an opportunity for news orgs to experiment with new displays of news without really impacting ad potential or frustrating the standard user. And that’s just what they’re doing — experimenting.

If these apps (which are all accessible from a web browser, even if you don’t have Chrome or the Chrome notebook) are any indicator of where the future of news design is headed, here are the trends I’m noticing:

Grid layouts

Every news app in the Google web store has a drastically different layout from its respective site and iPad app. The most common layout is a grid-style set of tiles which includes headlines, excerpts and photos for various sections or topics, as shown below in the NPR app, Salon app, and New York Times app.

Keyboard shortcuts

Switching amongst stories is intuitive in the Chrome store. It never made much sense from a UX perspective for a user to use the browser’s back button, then find the next story on the list to click in order to go through posts chronologically. Most of the Chrome apps allow you to navigate amongst articles and sections using simple keyboard strokes. Read more

R.I.P. Delicious.

Delicious — the laudable social network that launched seven years ago and popularized the concept of social bookmarking — is slated to be shut down by Yahoo.

While social networks come and go, Delicious (née del.icio.us) will be particularly missed because it has been a constant presence in my life for several years now. I use it for both personal and professional reasons, as do millions of other users. Some of the various reasons I use the site are listed below (consider it a eulogy):

To research 10,000 Words posts

As I allude to in this post, I use Delicious both to bookmark interesting things I see on the web if I don’t quite now how to feature it yet and also to find interesting content others have bookmarked under a specific topic. For example, for a post earlier this year on how news media covered same-sex marriage, I searched Delicious for keywords like “gay,” “LGBT,” “interactive,” and “journalism” and found interesting projects that I otherwise would not have found.

Delicious is also useful for getting a sense of how others have tagged a particular link. For example, if you look at the Delicious link for 10,000 Words, you’ll see some of the popular tags for the site are “journalism,” “technology,” “multimedia,” etc., all very useful information for tailoring and creating future content.

To understand the tastes of others
I often raid the Delicious bookmarks of other users like Mindy McAdams, author of Flash Journalism, and Scot Hacker, webmaster at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, to find links to content they think are interesting or cool. Because I trust their judgment, I know I will find always find some cool new tool or website.

Portfolio
My online portfolio always needs to be updated with new things I’m working and I, of course, can’t always do this immediately. I use Delicious to keep track of my work and it also enables me to easily share links with others.

Online shopping
Confession: I prefer buying things online rather than in stores, but because it is so easy to purchase things online, I sometimes bookmark potential purchases on Delicious as a sort of layaway plan. If I come back later and I still want the item, I purchase it. If not, I just delete the bookmark. A much better alternative to browser bookmarks which are front and center.

Inspiration
As I mentioned before, I keep a digital mood board (a folder on my computer) that contains interesting images, webpages, magazine tearsheets, and more that I use for inspiration. Saving a file on a computer is a static way of archiving online content, so I use Delicious to bookmark live websites, especially ones with interactive elements, and to also add notes to links that indicate why I found it interesting.

 
While there will inevitably be a slew of online tools that will try to fill the void in my online life left by Delicious Oh God, why couldn’t it have been MySpace, it’s hard to let go of any tool that has been such a boon to my productivity and life.

Update: Based on several suggestions I have exported my bookmarks from Delicious and imported them into Pinboard, a less social bookmarking service. Pinboard charges a fee ($8.01 for me) to use its service and to defray operating costs.

As 2010 draws to a close, Twitter and Facebook have looked back on the year’s most discussed topics.

Among the top 10 trends on both lists were World Cup, Haiti, iPad and Justin Bieber.

These top trends do not come as a surprise. Remember when Bieber was a perpetually trending topic on Twitter until Twitter changed their algorithm?

But the lack of many other news events on both lists were surprising. Since this is a blog about journalism and technology, here are three notable trends that are absent from both lists.

• The 2010 midterm elections. These are global trends, so the absence of such a U.S.-centric topic is understandable.
• The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The Olympics happened way back in February, but it’s clear the World Cup was the global sporting event of choice for social media users this year. In addition to “FIFA World Cup,” Vuvuzela also made Twitter’s top list.
• Wikileaks. Both “Wikileaks Cablegate” and “Julian Assange” made Twitter’s top news events and people list, respectively. However, they were not part of Twitter’s overall list, or Facebook’s list. Given the international scope of the story, this was surprising. Perhaps the fact this story broke late in the year had something to do with why Wikileaks was not included on either Twitter of Facebook’s main list.

Here’s something to keep in mind when interpreting these trends, especially on Twitter: a study out last week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that only 8 percent of online Americans use Twitter.

What other news trends missed Twitter and Facebook’s lists? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

UPDATE: Our sister blog WebNewser has more on Facebook’s trend list.

In my relatively brief, but storied career, I have met many journalists of all stripes who have inspired me, but none so much as Jennifer Roberts.

When I was a cops reporter at the Daytona Beach News-Journal in the small news market of Central Florida, reporters from various media were always covering the same stories. That meant that when I arrived on the scene, I would often see the same few people, among them local television news personality Jennifer Roberts.

Jennifer, always in a blazer and sensible shoes, could be seen darting around the scene, shooting and interviewing newsmakers, police chiefs, crime victims, etc. One she gathered her soundbites, she would usually set up her own tripod that she had lugged to the scene and shoot her standup. Often, I would come back to the newsroom in time to catch the evening news and there Jennifer would be, on the anchor desk reading the news of the day.

Jennifer Roberts (c), Photo: Hank Springer

So why was this inspirational? Because it taught me that reporters can perform a variety of roles in a single newsroom and shouldn’t limit themselves to a particular area of coverage or even a particular medium.

In essence, watching Jennifer Roberts dutifully fulfill multiple roles was my first introduction to the concept of the backpack journalist, long before the term became popular. A lot of my can-do attitude and the “you can do anything you put your mind to” mantra that I share on this blog stems from seeing a journalist early in my career who exemplified that mindset.

Even though I remember her and her work ethic fondly, I never actually had a conversation with Jennifer, though I remember her whenever I’ve got a backpack full of equipment I must juggle or am traveling solo on a journalistic mission. Whether you’re a mobile journalist, jack-of-all-trades in a small newsroom, or a reporter tasked with shooting in various media, we all share the common goal of reporting news by any means necessary.

Backpack journalism isn’t just limited to multimedia projects…broadcast journalists can get in the game with CuePrompter, an online teleprompter for journalists on the go.

CuePrompter is a free tool that lets anyone paste text into a field and have that text transformed into a legible full-screen prompt on a computer. You can set your script to scroll automatically, change the speed and select from various options, including font size and colors.

The tool allows reporters in the field to record scripted stand ups without having to memorize text or shuffle through papers. The hands-free approach can also give video a more professional look. Best of all, CuePrompter is free to use.

Every reporter needs a good writing instrument, even if you’re the most tech-savvy digital journalist in existence (you’ll never have to reboot a pen or pencil). Make sure your writing tool is as good as your writing with the following unique pens and pencils.

Smith & Wesson Military and Police Tactical Pen

The name itself is enough to send shivers down the spine but this pen/weapon packs a lethal punch. The aircraft-grade aluminum construction is enough to “fracture a skull,” according to one reviewer.

Amazon | $24.95

The Inkless Metal Pen

Instead of ink or lead that can smudge or run out, the Inkless Metal Pen adds tiny metal shavings to the page. This means you can write upside down, in inclement weather, and for a very long time.

VAT19 | $27.95

Sharpie Liquid Pencil

This unique Sharpie combines the best attributes of both the pen and pencil: it writes smoothly and erases like a pencil but after 72 hours, the ink changes and becomes permanent.

Amazon | $3.67 (for one)

Recycled Newspaper Pencils

Combine your love of journalism with your love of writing utensils with these cool pencils made from recycled newspaper.

TreeSmart.com | $8.00/24 pack

The Cramp Free Pen

Who knew that all this time we’ve been using pens and pencils that were not ergonomically designed? This pen may reduce the strain on your hand, but you may also get a few curious stares in the newsroom.

Hammacher Schlemmer | $19.95

The Seven Year Pen

The Seven Year Pen, so named because the jumbo cartridge means it lasts up to seven years, is a great idea as long as you don’t lose it or lend it.

Gent Supply Co. | $7.50 each

Hard Candy iPad Stylus and Pen

No need to switch between your writing pen and your iPad stylus with this twofer. Just make sure you don’t write on your iPad with the pen side.

Hard Candy | $34.95

Web icons are an underrated, yet very important part of any online news site. The small graphics help the reader quickly identify the type of content behind the link. They are especially useful for news sites who produces a variety of media, including photo slideshows, audio, video, and discussion pages.

The following examples are the icons used in several different news sites. These icons are presented here for illustrative purposes only and are the property of their respective owners. They should not be downloaded or replicated without consent.

 
Wall Street Journal:

 
New York Times:

 
Tampa Bay Online:

 
Washington Post:

 
Guardian (UK):

 
Le Monde:

 
NPR:

 
The best icons are simple and easy to identify, which is not as easy as it looks with such a small space usually just a few pixels high. If you want to create your own icons from scratch, Little Icon Editor makes them easier to design with its large grid approach.

 
If you’d rather use icons that have already been designed and created, you can use free clip art from sites like Iconfinder. You can also download high-quality icons from paid sites like iStockPhoto that make whole sets of related icons available.