Crazy Good!
50 tools to make you a better journalist
Get the list: tinyurl.com/radicallyruraltools
The 2021 iteration of Radically Rural's annual “50 Ideas” program focuses on tools for rural and nonrural reporters and editors. This tipsheet will walk you through the hacks, sources, tech and techniques to make you a better, smarter and savvier reporter and editor.
Produced by Samantha Sunne, freelance journalist and publisher of Tools for Reporters.
Did you know you can look up the owner of a website? These days, it's harder because of new rules, but you can use this tool to look up website registrants from a few years ago.
MuckRock started up in 2010 as a nonprofit collaborative news site to help journalists and others get and analyze government documents. It has a FOIA letter generator as well as a service to follow up on public records requests for you and a forum with other FOIA enthusiasts. Free to sign up; additional fees for help with document requests.
Search the Internet Archive’s database of websites going back to 1996. Search by site name to get a timeline showing years of archives, and then click a year for a monthly calendar. Click an archive date to dig deeper into the site’s archive that day. Use the Tutorial on the site to begin learning. Free.
Bellingcat’s Online Investigative Toolkit
This workbook organizes investigative tools into spreadsheets, like social media tools, apps for photo verification, map and satellite programs, and more. It is provided by Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists, and is updated periodically.
A colorful, interactive website that walks you through the "reading level" of your work. Ernets Hemingway favored short, to the point sentences, and you can, too!
Grammarly is a popular browser extension that checks for spelling and grammar errors, as well as offers suggestions on better writing. Used by writers all over the world, not just journalists.
This is a fun little tool from a science communications org that checks your work for jargon. It may be worth running your paragraphs through, especially if you're writing about a dense or technical topic that may be unfamiliar to your audience.
The video version of Descript - edit a video as if you were editing text. Easy to use! You only get 10 free minutes of video per month on the free level - after that, it's $12/month.
Don't you hate having to sit patiently through a whole video, waiting for the important part to come up? Many, if not most, YouTube videos are automatically transcribed. That means you can pop open the transcript of the video, Ctrl+F for what you're looking for, and voila!
This vaguely named app is a new tool from an open information nonprofit. It saves your files - like video and audio - to a secure location in the cloud before your connection can be interrupted. Meant for high risk situations like protests and riots.
A free desktop app that blocks websites on your computer - even if you log out, restart or open an incognito window, this app will NOT let you visit the website until your time is up!
A fun browser extension that gives you a pretty picture and a goal for the day. You can also set up clocks, reminders, weather widgets and more.
Are you subscribed to too many newsletters? This website turns them all into a newspaper-like homepage where you can scroll through the news and content at ease.
Set up automatic chains between apps, like emails, Twitter, websites, photos and more. If you've heard of IFTTT, it's similar to that, but IFTTT has sadly pretty much died. You get a few free Zaps before you have to start paying for a monthly plan.
This is a free mobile app, made by a journalist, for calculating common but tricky things like percent change. These math tasks may be simple, but can trip you up and have disastrous results in your reporting, so watch out!
Voice Memos
Voice recording apps (for both iPhone and Android) are good for recording conversations and interviews. You might need something with better sound quality for audio clips, though.
This phone call app (for both iPhone and Android) records the voices and returns a fairly good transcription.
If you need better quality, Otter is a good place to start. The free plan allows you to record, transcribes live as you record, and allows you to highlight text and comment. For the ability to upload pre-recorded files and have them transcribed, or add a common vocabulary (important if there’s a lot of jargon on your beat) the cost is @$9 a month.
A tool that lets you edit audio as if you were editing text! When you read, highlight, cut or edit the text of the transcript, the changes affect the audio file as well. A very advanced and intuitive way to cut or edit audio for a story or even just internal use.
For research in PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts, RECAP is an online archive and free extension for Firefox and Chrome that improves the user experience. Created as a joint project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and the Free Law Project.
Meant for freelancers, this resource for freelancers includes access to Nexis news sources, including newspapers, magazines, broadcast transcripts, newsletters, trade journals, legal news, and industry and country analyst reports. It offers access to contact info and clip searches that you can’t get pretty much anywhere else. $19.95/month (compared with $65-$89 for a full subscription), payable for a year’s membership.
We probably get too many press releases already, but this tool lets you sign up to get press releases for topics you're interested in. You can sign up for alerts on companies, cities, people or topics you may be covering.
This website watches other websites - and even harder things, like online PDFs. When Distill notices a change, it will send you an email. You get 5 free pages per month, or 25 for $15/month.
This desktop and mobile app is particularly good for keeping track of investigations and complex stories. The free version allows you to organize notes and web links in an unlimited number of documents and to sync 2 devices. Personal and professional plans are $8 and $10 a month. Several add-ons are useful beyond project management; you’ll find some in the list of tools below.
A nimble project management tool for solo or collaborative use, Trello has digital "boards" with vertical lists, which you populate with cards. Each card can be an action item or a repository of reference information. Click the card to open it and write a description, assign a due date, attach a color-coded label, add a checklist, or write comments that are automatically dated. Free for up to 10 boards; has iOS and Android mobile apps.
Send people a link to create an event right on your calendar. Save time and connect it to your iCal or Gcal so you don't have to bother with scheduling. Great for source calls or colleagues.
This journalist-made service allows you to save, share, and analyze documents and embed links to them on your website or in your story. It has advanced tools like "entity analysis," which makes a list of all the people, places and things listed in your document.
This multi-format conversion app is used for converting, storing and sharing documents. Data from PDFs can be transferred to Word, Excel, HTML, and other formats. Free for documents up to 150MB, up to 5 conversions a week.
This annotation tool uses an existing image or captures a new one, then adds arrows, adds shapes, or allows you to write on it with the pen or highlighter tool. Its most useful feature is probably Pixelation, which lets you blur or pixelate out names or parts of an image and still have it look professional.
Overview is a comprehensive tool made by a journalist that reads, analyzes and sorts through thousands - even millions! - of documents. If you have a big pile of documents to get through, and don't want to read them all, this tool is for you.
Do you have documents, but want to have spreadsheets? This free tool is also made by journalists. It identifies and pulls out tables in documents, so that you can go straight to Excel - where it was always meant to be!
Sometimes we just don't have time to make a whole data visualization ourselves. If you're reporting on something timely, like the Olympics or natural disasters, chances are there may be a pre-prepared Google Trends Insight visualization ready for you to use.
This is one of the premiere data visualization making tools right now (especially with the demise of Google Fusion Tables). The interface for inputting data and making charts can be a little daunting, but it gives you the most bang for your buck. Free for journalists!
This is a tutorial I wrote on how to create your own interactive map - either to visualize data, like from a spreadsheet, or just to create one with points by hand. This can be a great and surprisingly easy way to visualize something with a geographic element.
Google's Common Knowledge Project
Another freel tool from Google meant to take a lot of the work out of creating infographics. The Common Knowledge Projects takes some of the most commonly used datasets (populations, employment, etc) and sets up a nice point-and-click format to visualize them.
This app allows you to attach an e-signature to contracts, forms and other documents. You can use the free version for up to 3 signatures a month; for more, the essential version is $15/month.
This handy Gmail add-on allows users to schedule emails - both those you send, and incoming messages you want to deal with later. You can also set reminders to follow up if your correspondents don’t answer. It’s free for up to 10 messages a month, $5/month for unlimited messages on the personal plan.
This tool lets you keep track of expenses on your mobile apps offline and then turn that mode off to upload them to your online account. You can use it to track expenses and mileage, send and receive money (if you wish), submit expense statements, and split bills for business meals. It has a SmartScan function to scan receipts, with up to 25 scans a month on the free plan. For more, the fee is $5/month.
Authory brings together all of the articles you’ve written so far. It backs up new work as it’s published on the internet and allows you to create a portfolio of out-of-print and current stories. It also allows you to track your work’s performance on social media. Free for SPJ members of ethnic minority backgrounds.
Save your work! Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari allow you to save the current versions of pages you access on the internet. This is great for doing research as well as saving your own clips. Things tend to disappear on the Internet over the course of several years, so don't let that happen to your articles!
Muck Rack is a networking site that connects PR professionals with journalists who might write about their clients. Many journalists use their profiles on the site as their portfolios. Free to sign up.
See who tweeted or retweeted links to your stories. You must have a free MuckRack account to use this tool. Somewhat similar to the CrowdTangle extension below, but has a slightly more sophisticated Twitter searching feature.
This tool allows you to make easy, trendy-looking one-page portfolio websites. Free for one site; $9/month for up to 3 sites and for advanced features like custom domains.
This is a free version of the much more expansive and expensive CrowdTangle tool. Install this extension to see quick glimpses of who shared a link on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit. Good for research as well as tracking your own stories.
We all have too many passwords. Try using a password manager, like LastPass or 1Password, to store them all for you. It can also create more secure passwords on your behalf. 1Password created a free account tier for journalists!
Do you need to send a file - like a password, an embargoed story, or a super secret interview? You shouldn't just email it… try using a tool like this to send files through Tor, an extremely secure, anonymous web browser.
Tor is the above-mentioned secure web browser. It is the most secure (free) way out there to make sure your searches and web history are not being tracked. It's also great if you want to see what search results might look like without personalization.
The same goes for messages - Signal encrypts messages from end to end, and you can set them to disappear, James Bond style, after a certain amount of time. Great for sharing passwords and logins with your colleagues.
Samantha's newsletter goes out every other week with a simple, effective tool that will make your reporting life easier.
This tutorial page has walkthroughs on web scraping, mapmaking, Excel, documents, data and much more.