Chris Amico: Journalist

Journalists need new tools to work online. In the last year, I’ve used more that I can count, most of them free, to find and tell better stories on the Web.

Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful, so I’m releasing it into the wild.

Try out Tools for News

The site is in public beta for now. Eventually, I hope to move it to its own domain.

Anyone can browse this site and subscribe to an RSS feed. Registering allows you to add new tools, add links to existing tools and bookmark tools, which will be saved on your contributor page.

Feeds available (as of Jan. 5, 2009):

• Latest tools
• Latest links
• Tools by category
• Tools by user

(more…)

James Buck secured freedom from an Egyptian jail, but wants the world to remember the plight of his translator.

Read it in the East Bay Express here.

James Buck is famous on Twitter. The photojournalist and UC Berkeley graduate student used the messaging service to text “Arrested” as Egyptian police took him into custody on April 10, and after a flood of media coverage, he was released the next day. But Buck would like a different name remembered: Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, his 23-year-old interpreter, who was taken at the same time.

Maree may still be in prison. The veterinary student has been held in a high-security facility called Borg al Arab outside Alexandria since his arrest two months ago, and while local news reports say he may be freed soon, neither Buck nor aid workers in his case could be certain. Maree has been tortured, Buck and others allege. According to his family and Human Rights Watch, he has gone on a hunger strike and been put in solitary confinement. Agents of the interior ministry have allegedly threatened the family, saying that Maree will never be released, even though no charges have officially been filed. Other organizers of the April protests have gotten out, but Maree, for a time, was simply lost in the system. (more…)