If I were a news media journalist what social media tools would I use to make my job easier? I attended a social media panel this morning hosted by news media journalists moving into the social media space and it made me think a lot about what tools I would use if I were in their shoes. Here’s what comes to mind…

First of all, I’d act like an editor and treat the millions of content creators on the internet as my personal little cub reporters. I’d harvest their content and build my stories using the following tools:

• Google Reader + Google Alerts + Feedly to aggregate my own personal newspaper from trusted sources
• Socialmention for ‘real-time social media search and analysis’
• Tweetmeme for tracking the hottest trends and links on Twitter

When it came to sharing the stuff I’d found, I’d use Shareaholic and some combination of the following tools to promote my reporting:

• Posterous for autoposting to multiple social media outlets
• ScribeFire [if I had a blog]
• Hootsuite for all my Twitter needs

btw, I cheated on the first line — there are really nine tools in this post, but Google Reader + Google Alerts + Feedly all act as one unit to deliver a ‘virtual newspaper’ or magazine jam packed with valuable source content. Socialmention and Tweetmeme are good for ‘taking the pulse’ of a topic. The other tools depend on what type of tools are use for promoting content that’s been posted online. It kind of assumes the media outlet has a YouTube channel, etc., but that may be a pretty big assumption. Personally, I think the combination of Shareaholic + Posterous is the killer combination for promotion. Learn these two tools and you’ll be able to grab content FROM anywhere and post it TO anywhere so easily that you’ll be able add all those additional posting responsibilities without breaking a sweat!

If this list seems daunting or the post has you scratching your head, comment, call or contact and I’ll break it down for you. Happy deadlines!