6 Journalism Tools to Try in 2024
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
Is one of your New Year’s resolutions to try a new journalism tool? What are you waiting for?
Advancements in AI mean the wave of new tools utilizing the tech is coming hard and fast for journalists, with products from small startups all the way to Google being developed. It can be hard to know which ones to try. Are they still being tested? Are there ethical concerns with using them in your work?
In this post, we round up a few newer but established tools, many of which include some form of AI, for you to give a try this year. They can help with visualizations, transcription, coding, and more.
Who knows, one might be just the tool you’re looking for to make life easier.
Datawrapper
If you’re looking to try a new data visualization tool, give Datawrapper a go. No coding skills are required and users can create responsive charts, maps, and tables from their data. You can create visualizations that match your brand style and update as your data changes, among many other useful features. The powerful tool is free to use, though it also offers paid plans for professional and enterprise solutions.
Google Voice
Not quite a new tool, Google Voice came to our attention via Tools for Journalists back in September. If you put out a call for story tips, for example, Google Voice comes in handy as it can forward calls from the web, block spam calls, and transcribe voicemails. It’s also able to sync across your devices so you can use the app in the office, at home, or on the go, which makes it ideal for journalists.
Glimmer.io
If you’re a whiz with words but need some assistance in the video department, check out Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter). Connect with videographers, editors, and other experts to create high-quality video content that makes your content more compelling, shareable, and eye-catching. With more than 50,000 creators using the collaboration platform to find projects, you should have no trouble finding the one who’s a perfect fit for your project.
kandi
We’ve said it before: Coding is a great skill for journalists to develop. kandi is a wealth of open-source libraries, code snippets, and kits. The tool can help you develop faster and boost your understanding of coding languages like Python and JavaScript. Get the code for creating a QR code for your blog post or generating a word cloud from a dataset. Build a full fashion recommendation engine with Python. If you have a functionality that you want to see in your app but aren’t sure how to go about implementing it, check out kandi.
Overtone.ai
The sheer amount of articles out there makes it difficult to determine exactly what content is about without clicking into and reading it yourself. Overtone.ai works with publishers and news aggregators to help them sort through news articles efficiently based on the content itself, rather than metrics like clicks and shares. The tool can help surface articles for your newsletter or social media posts, for example, making life for human editors easier.
Pinpoint
Pinpoint is a research tool for journalists from the Google News Initiative. Users can create their own document collections or browse those of Google’s partners, including Big Local from Stanford University and The Center for Public Integrity. Pinpoint will automatically create an index of the most commonly mentioned people, locations, and organizations in the documents, making for quick and easy searches among handwritten documents, images, news articles, forms, and more. A single Pinpoint collection can contain up to 200,000 documents! Pinpoint can also generate searchable transcriptions from audio files up to two hours long, like interviews or press conference recordings.
Didn’t find what you need here and want to see if AI fits into your work this year? Check out PAI’s detailed list of AI tools for local newsrooms. The tools help reporters with everything from content creation to social media discovery, audience engagement, data analysis, and much more.
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Rocky Parker is the Manager of Audience and Journalist Engagement at Cision PR Newswire. She's been with the company since 2010 and has worked with journalists and bloggers as well as PR and comms professionals. Outside of work, she can be found trying a new recipe, binging a new show, or cuddling with her pitbull, Hudson.
