Tip of the hat to Tyler Chance for this package of digital tips.
Tools for gathering information
- Audio
- iPhone earbuds mic can be useful on voiceovers (DP)
- Photo
- A Nashville filter can’t save bad photography. Find some external lenses for an iPhone. They aren’t all expensive. You’ll thank yourself later.
- Social
- Visual approach to posts
- Tools for disseminating/editing information
- Audio
- Dragon Dictation (may be a help, but still kind of funky and can’t be used as a crutch. But still, it keeps getting more accurate)
- Video
- iMovie app
- ProCamera
- Photo
- Instagram as a tool, not a savior.
- Text
- Tabula (gathers data from PDF tables)
- PlainText (links with DropBox accounts)
- OpenRefine (clean up messy data)
- Tools for presentation
- Infographics/DataViz
- Quartz’s newly open-sourced Chartbuilder
- Tableau Free Edition
- Social
- Audio
- SoundCloud (can embed a player for your files, or play straight from the site)
- Text
- ScrollKit (can help you make animated long form pages. They were able to recreate ‘Snow Fall’ in an hour.)
- Eye to the future: what’s ahead for individual publishing/branding
- Newspad : Community blogging/reporting.
- IFUSSSS (If you see something, share something) : Community video newsgathering platform that acts as a middleman between the users and the broadcast companies. Narrowing down a model that actually PAYS royalties for videos used from the site.
- Kindle Singles : A platform for people to download single stories. There have been success stories already.
- A necessary kick in the pants about knowing the pros/cons of each tool (don’t use it just because you can, know WHY you should use it.)
