With all of the talk about collaborating within the journalism department and building a web-based community for students at San Jose State, I sometimes forget that work still needs to be done to improve workflow and communication among staff on the Spartan Daily.

Changes to the Spartan Daily next semester include the use of pbwiki and Google Calendar.

pbwiki is one of the easiest wikis to operate and requires no installation. We hope that it will be useful in having the staff share story ideas, contact names and numbers and allow easy reference to our style guide. It can also be useful in providing information for how to file stories, tone photos and upload files to college publisher among other things.

Google Calendar, and its ability to share calendars, allows editors to create event calendars for each section, and turn each calendar off and on with the click of a button. Editors can also put in availability calendars for the writers and photographers, allowing them to match up assignments with available staff.

An add-on that I have found useful for Google Calendar has been Remember the Milk for Google Calendar. Remember the Milk adds a to-do list feature to Google Calendar, allowing its users to easily add, complete and see overdue tasks. Using the to-do list through the Remember the Milk site also allows users to add locations which can later be assigned to tasks and viewed on Google Maps within Remember the Milk or within Google Calendar.

Hopefully, implementing these changes will increase productivity among the staff, reduce any barriers between photographer and writer and give the staff a place to go to find and provide information quickly and easily.