March 19, 2011

SXSW: 5 More Great Sites for Progressive Media Types

SXSW Interactive: Austin Convention Center.Photo: Laura McClure

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Yesterday I blogged about 5 online bon bons and what makes them so sweet. But wait! There’s more in that digital candy dish! Forthwith, five sites and apps joining Storify, Tumblr, Readability, DocumentCloud, and MuckRock as my picks from 2011’s SXSW Interactive. (Read my first 5 reviews here.)

1. Freedom.

Tagline: “Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to 8 hours at a time. Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to write, analyze, code, or create.”

Sweet spot: Nora Ephron, Peggy Orenstein, and other great writers swear by it.

2. Ushahidi.

Tagline: “Ushahidi is a platform that allows information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping, allowing anyone to submit information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or web form.”

Sweet spot: This free, open-source crowdmapping platform makes lo-tech phones a smart choice for crowdsourced data viz. (See: Japan people finder.)

3. Scribd.

Tagline: “Millions of documents and books at your fingertips! Read, print, download, and send them to your mobile devices instantly. Or upload your PDF, Word, and PowerPoint docs to share them with the world’s largest community of readers.”

Sweet spot: Presentations, spread sheets, and how-to manuals of all stripes find a good home here.

4. Instapaper.

Tagline: “Save long web pages to read later, when you have time, on your computer, iPhone, iPad, or Kindle.”

Sweet spot: Instapaper shines when paired with the #longreads twitter feed.

5. Longreads.

Tagline: A free, daily dose of timeless, community/editor-curated “long-form journalism, magazine stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents” from top magazines.

Sweet spot: The Top 5 Longreads of the week will change your commute. Even better: Each story comes with a time estimate of how long it’ll take you to read it, and you can search the site by 15-minute reads, 30-minute reads, etc.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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