IRE | DIGITAL TOOLS

June 14, 2018

Samantha Sunne, Tools for Reporters newsletter + Ren LaForme, digital tools reporter, Poynter

1. Happy Scribe

• Automatically transcribe audio interviews done with a mic/phone recorder app
• Pro: Less feature-rich but also cheaper than Trint, which we also recommend
• Con: Interviews recorded via phone call or web conferencing won’t transcribe well
• Price: 10 cents per minute transcribed

2. Tetra 

• Record phone interviews and receive an automatic transcription via email
• Pro: One of the only ways to get a clear transcription with a remote speaker
• Pro: Has a feature to inform the interviewee that you’re recording, saving you from any legal liability of forgetting to do so
• Con: Can’t use your own phone number
• Price: Free for now while in beta mode

3. Descript

• Upload single- or multi-track audio files and Descript transcribes them. Then edit the text to edit the audio without fiddling with waveforms.
• Pro: Magic?
• Pro: Exports to major audio editing tools to keep the process going
• Con: Mac only, at least for the moment
• Price: 15 cents per minute with free version (30 minutes free) or 7 cents per minute with $10/month full version

4. Klaxon

• Automatically track changes on any website
• Pro: Easy to use once it’s set up.
• Con: Not very easy to set up.
• Price: Free
• Alternative: ChangeDetection.com

1. Recently announced it's moving to visualping.io, which will be paid

5. Hunter.io

• Find email addresses for hard-to-track people
• Can also verify an email is real before sending
• Pro: Super easy to use
• Con: You have to sign in
• Price: Free for 100 searches/month

6. Privacy Badger

• Blocks trackers from following you around the internet
• Pro: No annoying auto-play video ads or aggressive information trackers
• Con: Breaks some features on some sites
• Price: Free

7. ExpertiseFinder & Help A Reporter

• Find sources on any subject
• Pro: Find anyone, from the mainstream to the obscure
• Con: Limited to the people who appear on those sites
• Price: Free
• Alternatives:

1. https://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/
2. https://sourcelist.org/
3. https://diversesources.org/ 

8. Headliner

• Make audio shareable and visual for social
• Pro: Ridiculously easy to use
• Con: Don’t use the automatic feature, it loads up problematic stock images
• Price: Free

9. RevEye & Google Reverse Image Search

• Verify photos with a reverse image search
• Pro: Super easy ways to check the veracity of images or find out what it's an image of
• Con: Limited only to what these engines find. If it’s not there, it doesn’t necessarily mean the image is legit.
• Price: Free

10. InVID & YouTube Dataviewer

• Background YouTube videos and find metadata on videos
• Pro: Similar to RevEye and Google Reverse, but for video; Tons of options for finding hidden data on videos
• Con: Similar issues with the latter; Only works on YouTube
• Price: Free

11. Internet Archive

• View webpages that have been taken down or changed
• Pro: You can also use it to save your own work or pages you want saved
• Con: Not every site is guaranteed to be archived
• Price: Free
• Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak
• Another fun one: Politwoops saves deleted tweets from politicians

12. DocumentCloud

• A huge set of tools for documents: annotate, share, embed, search, analyze 
• Pro: Has many lesser-known features that are very advanced
• Con: Free accounts will start having limitations next year (2019)
• Price: Free

13. Gestimer

• Set a reminder right from the Mac menu bar
• Pro: Extremely simple - just pull down an icon from the menu bar
• Con: Mac only; Can't set a timer more than 5.5 hours into the future
• Price: $3.99

14. FOIA trackers

• iFOIA

1. Use a pre-prepared legal guide to write state or federal FOIAs
2. Pro: Written by actual media attorneys, so is very good at incorporating the law
3. Con: Interface can be clunky and confusing
4. Price: Free

• MuckRock

1. Make a FOIA letter with automatic recipients and shared templates
2. Pro: Can see FOIA requests other people have made and compare notes
3. Con: Everyone else can see your FOIA unless you subscribe to a premium service
4. Price: Free, or Premium service up to $100/month

15. OpenCorporates

• Background a private company
• Pro: The largest repository of data on companies in the world
• Con: Not comprehensive; Crowdsourced
• Price: Free

16. Charity Navigator

• Look up financial info on a charity or nonprofit
• Pro: Also evaluates finances and ethics of larger charities
• Con: Takes a while for 990s to appear
• Price: Free
• Alternative: ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer

17. GovTrack

• Track bills going through the U.S. Congress
• Pro: Assigns a number to the bill's likelihood of passing
• Con: May not be entirely nonpartisan
• Price: Free

18. Sqoop

• Search SEC filings, court dockets, patents and press releases
• Pro: Can search by location; Set alerts
• Con: Now has an option for brands to place ads in your results
• Price: Free for journalists; $99/month otherwise

19. Tabula

• Scrape data out of PDFs
• Pro: Easy to click and drag; can automatically scrape tables from multiple pages
• Con: Doesn't work on PDFs that were images (like a photo of a piece of paper); Need to download Java to run on Windows
• Price: Free

20. CometDocs

• Convert PDFs to more useful file types, like Excel or Doc
• Pro: The most consistently successful PDF converter
• Con: Converting to Excel occasionally messes up the data
• Price: Free for IRE members; $10/month for non-members
• Alternative: smallpdf

21. WhoIs

• Find out who a website is registered to
• Pro: Also useful simply to dig up someone's email address
• Con: People often use third parties, like GoDaddy
• Price: Free

22. ViewDNS

• Find all the domain names registered to a certain person
• Pro: Tons of options for researching websites and IPs
• Con: Lots of people use third party registrars, like GoDaddy
• Price: Free

23. Evernote

• Keep track of sprawling investigations, save articles and search text
• Pro: Also the best scanner I've ever found
• Con: There are simply so many features you'll need to design your own way to use it
• Price: Free for basic; $70/year for premium
• Alternative: OneNote if you prefer Microsoft Office, or Google Keep if you prefer G Suite

24. IntelTechniques

• Search a ton of sites to background a person or a topic
• Pro: Works better than Facebook Graph Search or other on-site search tools
• Con: Need to sign in to the sites for most of them to work; Limited to what people make public
• Price: Free

And:

Try This! newsletter by Ren LaForme

Tools for Reporters newsletter by Samantha Sunne