The New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation (FNPI) is scheduling a webinar in Spanish called “Eight web tools for practical and passionate journalism”.

The seminar will be lead by author and online journalism guru Francis Pisani and will cover new tools for better microblogging, map design, data and source organization, and search engine optimization. read more »

Access to Twitter has been available until now only in English and Japanese. But this week, the microblogging network launched a Spanish version that was translated from English by volunteer collaborators, EFE and CNET explain. read more »

The international blogging community Global Voices has launched Threatened Voices, a site that tracks the suppression of online expression. The site centralizes information from a range of free speech advocacy networks with a map and timeline of threats, arrests, and violence due to online speech. read more »

IJNet columnist Amy Webb has this helpful post that points out ways to make your digital content, including tweets, reach larger audiences.
Webb introduces the Twanslate and ConveyThis translation tools and points out the translate feature of the CoverItLive blogging and chat tool. read more »

The UN Climate Change Conference, scheduled for Dec. 7–18 in Copenhagen, will challenge journalists—professionals and citizens— to explain the issue to readers. Global Voices Online provides several tools for learning more about the topic. read more »

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has released a global online database of journalists who have suffered violent deaths relating to their work since 1992. The database is designed to memorialize those who have died and to call for justice in unsolved cases.

Three Latin American countries, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, are among the 10 deadliest for journalists, with Colombia in third with 39 cases. read more »

Whether you teach journalism or communication in a classroom or newsroom, or you’re trying to expand your own knowledge, there are 18 course plans/syllabi available at this very useful site created by Serena Carpenter, a professor at Arizona State University.

The documents come from 18 instructors. All are in English. (Online translators available.)

In a new video on its YouTube journalism training channel, “IJNet Video,” IJNet writer Seth Palmer shows journalists how to use Google Maps within an online story and why knowledge of this program can be useful to readers and viewers.

Before getting started with this program Palmer recommends you:

*Know what you want to do with Google maps.
*Have basic knowledge of HTML code.
*Have a Google account. read more »

If you write about, or read about science, you’ll appreciate what Wired Science calls “the five most annoying and ubiquitous clichés we think should be sucked into a black hole, forever banished from all future descriptions of science.”
On the list:

1. Holy Grail. “The mother of all bad science clichés, the worst offender.”
2. Silver bullet. Followed by “magic bullet" and "smoking gun."
3. Shedding light. “Why must everything always be sheddling light on something else?” read more »

The handbook, which guides all Reuters journalists, has not been freely available to the public until now, but the British company is providing it as a service and to be more transparent to news audiences. In a new age of citizen journalism, it is also “a good place for budding journalists to begin,” says Dean Wright, Global Editor for Innovation and News Standards. read more »

The Obama administration presented new online tools this week to track and analyze the more than $70 billion a year that the federal government spends on information technology, Steve Lohr reports for The New York Times. read more »

The United Nations' Alliance of Civilizations recently revamped and relaunched the Global Expert Finder (GEF), a searchable database of commentators, analysts and academics who have expertise in many topics, including politics, law, education, women's rights, human rights, terrorism, globalization, religion, and art. IJNet recently interviewed the UN's Daanish Masood about GEF and how journalists can benefit from the service. read more »

The E-Book How to Write for the Web, written by Colombian journalist Guillermo Franco, was published online by the Knight Center in December 2008. Since then, it's been downloaded more than 20,000 times, and a second edition is already in progress.

The 221-page book presents practical examples about writing for online publications. Spanish and Portuguese versions of the book can be accessed for free in PDF format from the Knight Center’s website. read more »

The Deena Stryker Photographs collection is now available digitally through Duke University Libraries. The collection contains photographs of Cuba taken between July 1963 and July 1964 by the journalist after whom the collection is named. read more »

A number of organizations are providing resources for journalists who are covering the swine flu outbreak.

*Centers for Disease Control Swine Flu Data and Statistics

*World Health Organization information in English and Spanish read more »

"You've laid off staff. You're doing more with less. You are introducing new technology and new tasks to your team. Welcome to the life of today's newsroom manager," says Jill Geisler, head of Poynter's Leadership and Management Group. On her blog, the expert offers 25 tips to those who hold management positions in a newsroom.

They come from 52 broadcast newsroom managers who recently attended a workshop called "Tough Times, Smart Managers".

Here are some of the tips they shared: read more »

To support the work of journalists, the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism (Abraji) has launched the site "Thematic Maps of Brazil," a series of maps about education, crime, elections, population, the news media, and other themes.

All the high-resolution maps, can be reproduced for journalistic purposes, as long as the source is cited, Abraji says. New interactive maps dealing with other themes will be added soon. read more »

The Spanish news site has introduced six online dictionaries that allow users to find word meanings in Spanish, English, and French. A Spanish dictionary of synonyms and antonyms is also available.

In addition to the dictionaries, ElPais.com also hosts a translation page that functions in Spanish, English, German, and French.