Tool of the Day: Cuttings.me

Gone are the days when a reporter printed out his or her clips and snail-mailed them to a hiring editor or human resources. In fact, for many young job seekers, this is a scenario they have never encountered and probably never will. Now, almost every single job posting asks applicants to apply online and include links to their work. If you're ahead of the game, you already have a blog or website where you collect and showcase links to your best work, Twitter account, LinkedIn, etc. (One of my personal favorites is the website of Craig Kanalley, the new social media editor at NBC News.) Traditionally, there's two ways of displaying your articles. One is to make a page on your site, normally called "Clips" or something similar, and fill it with links of your best work. (This is done by copying and pasting the headline of your story and then hyperlinking it.) The second way is to direct readers to an online author archive based at your news organization that shows all the stories you've written for that site. What's frustrating about both tactics is that they aren't particularly visually appealing. Enter Cuttings.me, a new service that provides journalists with a free, online platform to showcase their work. The site launched in October and was created by travel journalist Nicholas Holmes to fill the void he found when he tried to share and upload his work online. "I launched cuttings.me last month after finding that there was no easy way to collate my cuttings together online," he wrote in a blog post on the European Journalism Centre (EJC) community forum. (EJC also recently featured the new platform.) He tells journalism.co.uk: What I found is that I was always having to send different URL’s in emails. It all got a bit messy when I was trying to remember the best bits that I had done and found I had the need for a single place to put all of this stuff and wanted the ability to direct people to that single page. The main draw of Cuttings.me is that it allows you to upload PDFs or add links of your stories in a really easy format. In a matter of seconds, you have a nice way to show off your best clips. Setting up Cuttings.me is a breeze. After registering and creating a profile, which provides you with a unique URL (ex: cuttings.me/elanazak), users can write a biography and link to other sites, such as their Facebook or Twitter pages. Holmes, who adamantly states he is not a developer or programmer, was able to design and code the site himself. And so far, he said users are enjoying his creation. "The response so far has been great. It’s clear that journalists need a tool like this, even if they already have their own website – much of the feedback received so far has been about how easy the site is to use in comparison to modifying a personal site, for instance," he writes in the EJC blog post. Cuttings.me is currently in public beta. You can give your feedback by tweeting @cuttingsme. Have you found it challenging to move your clips online in a visually appealing way? What workarounds have you found?

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Tool of the Day: Cuttings.me

Elana Zak

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Elana Zak