Productivity
Productivity
RECENT UPDATES
GIJN: Google Pinpoint As a Search Engine for Documents, Photos and Video
Legitimate
Centralize all your work, processes, tools and files into one platform, specifically designed for journalists. Save valuable time by having everything you need to write your stories in one place. All students that sign up will have free access to our tool suite for life.
Machine Translation
Provides access to all available machine translation engines for journalists to easily translate their work into the target language with the best results.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
NOTE-TAKING AND WRITING TOOLS
Workflowy
A simple outlining tool that works in any browser or as an app on your device: Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS.
Roam Research
Bi-directional linking that assists with note-taking and research.
Notion
Great for note-taking, time-tracking, making handouts, etc. An all-in-one workspace.
Coda
Collaborative team documents. Works well for spreadsheets and data projects.
Noted
An iOS & macOS app tool that is perfect for journalists and professionals to quickly and easily capture every great idea. Noted is enhanced with the unique #TimeTag feature, which makes recalling important information like #Highlights and #ToDos quick and effective. Noted solves both problems by letting you take notes while recording time-stamped Zoom/ video and audio recordings, saving you lots of time to review each session.
Gems
AI-powered writing assistant. You can visually create, organize and connect notes and see how your story outline is coming together on use it as an infinite whiteboard. AI finds similarities between ideas so you can see hidden connections, be more creative and fill the page. It’s useful for investigative journalists to conduct research and turn files, docs, and notes into insightful discoveries faster.
Jasper
AI writing tool
Postwise.ai
AI-driven Twitter writing tool
Craft.do
Document-creation tool with AI features
Mem
A self-organizing workspace. It’s the world’s first AI-powered workspace that’s personalized to you.
Tana
Easily turn raw notes into tasks, bugs, follow-ups and more. No more context switching, copy-and-pasting, or ad hoc spreadsheets and docs. Moving out of private beta in 2023.
Typora
Gives you a seamless experience as both a reader and a writer. It removes the preview window, mode switcher, syntax symbols of markdown source code, and all other unnecessary distractions. Instead, it provides a real live preview feature to help you concentrate on the content itself.
BeefText
Open-source text substitution tool for Windows.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
GIJN: Tips for Using Open-Source Tools When Reporting from Home
Legitimate
Centralize all your work, processes, tools and files into one platform, specifically designed for journalists. Save valuable time by having everything you need to write your stories in one place. All students that sign up will have free access to our tool suite for life.
Keyboard Shortcut List
Shortcuts and Hot Keys Reference for Windows, Mac OS, Linux.
KeepVid.com
Download streaming video from YouTube and other sites to edit and use in your video.
Turn YouTube Videos into GIFs by Adding GIF to URL
Toggl Track
Time-tracking software.
123Apps
A Swiss Army knife collection of browser-based web editing and productivity tools along the lines of TinyWow.
Fanurio
Time-tracking tool for freelancers.
BBC Africa Eye: Digital Forensics Dashboard
A collation of some essential tools tailored to journalists using open source intelligence (OSINT) to carry out investigations.
Around
Remote meeting tool that includes a notes-sharing doc and other useful features. Free trial before purchase and you can test it in the browser.
Awesome Screenshot
Capture any part of a page and add text, graphics. Plug-in for Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
After the Deadline
Download this desktop tool to check grammar and style, do contextual spell check and more. It’s more advanced than Microsoft Word.
Google Test My Site for Mobile/Desktop
Test your site’s performance across mobile and desktop devices.
WebSiteGrader
Evaluates your site based on SEO, design-friendliness, etc.
TrendsMap.com
A great visual mashup that allows you to pinpoint Twitter topics trending across the country.
Becoming: Hundreds of Digital Tools from Stephen Goforth
Tools for engagement, mobile, maps, polls quizzes and more.
Distill.io
Track other websites and get notified of when they make changes to the site/pages.
Tiny Wow
A great collection of tools that solve file management issues.
135List.com
A simple but clean digital daily task planner.
ExportData
Twitter data export tool. Allows downloading historical tweets since 2006, exporting unlimited followers and followings, and gathers historical Twitter trends in 63 countries and 400 cities.
Down Detector
Sends you alerts when your favorite social platforms and sites are down.
Maker.ai
Generate written and visual content in seconds through cutting-edge artificial intelligence. $25 per month with free trial.
Google Tables
Great for collaboration with Google Sheets and other docs. Set up workspaces, templates, etc. Works similar to AirTable.
GIJN Online Research Tools
An extensive list of digital tools, including Journalist’s Toolbox.
Air.inc
Great image storage resource.
7 Best Free OCR Software Apps to Convert Images into Text
Changedetection.io
Website change detection and notification, monitors changes in website content, easily alerts you via slack, discord, telegram, email and 80-plus more. Easily setup keyword triggers, compare pages. Also monitors JSON feeds and other data.
Napkin
Post notes on a visual board and draw connections to other ideas
Milanote
Create mood boards with text, images, links, etc.
Xtiles
A digital bulletin board for ideas.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Repurpose.io
Tool for automating workflows. Good for autoposting social media.
Synthesia
Create a video from plain text in minutes. Good for creating a talking avatar
Murf
Text-to-speech tool
Eagle
Organize your images online.
Center for Cooperative Media: Useful Links and Websites
A table of great resources that’s downloadable as a CSV file.
Grain
Record and transcribe Zoom meetings and interviews.
Veed.io Video Converter
Convert videos to different file formats including MP4, AVI, MKV, WMV, MOV, FLV, and more.
Adobe Fresco Painting App
Sketch something and size it up from the original size without pixelation.
Stck.me
Build a super profile for your social accounts. Post audio, ebooks, video, etc.
Google Journalists Guide
Launched in April 2022, this guide helps journalists learn about the best digital tools and resources from Google and beyond, to help you find, verify and tell engaging stories. Take a course to discover Newsgathering, Data & Visualization and Specialist topics.
Workona
Tab and bookmark organizer for your browser.
Remove bg: Remove a Background from Images
SlickInbox
A great way to manage e-newsletters in one place, away from your regular email.
Veed.io Transcription Tool
Transcribe audio and video to text online. Automatic transcription in just one click.
MailBrew
Personal email digest tool. The links you can’t miss, the best content from your favorite creators and newsletters, in a daily email digest.
Kobotoolbox
Reliable free field surveys.
Ice Cream Apps: Screen Recorder
Tool for making introductions.
PDF Candy
Free suite of PDF and file conversion tools.
The GIMP Tutorials
A tutorial site that covers everything you might want to do in GIMP (an open source image editing program), from basic editing operations to advanced custom brush creation and RAW photo editing workflows.
Listen Notes
A podcast search engine.
Manganum
Productivity plug-in for Google Chrome browser.
NewsDeck – from OneSub
Find, filter and analyze thousands of articles, daily. NewsDeck uses the power of OneSub’s intelligent newsreader AI to give you realtime access to the global news cycle.
Listium
A website for creating and sharing lists. Examples of lists published on Listium include products, places, collections, directories and links. Listium is typically used as an alternative to: spreadsheets, when you want something simpler and more attractive; or text lists and tables, when you want more functionality like the ability to sort and filter the list, and also to change its appearance (eg. from a table to an article to a map to a slideshow).
InoReader
Read up to 150 social media accounts in this reader.
VisualPing.io
Track website updates. Enter a URL and it sends you an update when a website has been updated.
Inoreader
A powerful content reading platform, which allows you to discover and consume relevant information on any topic. It can convert any meaningful information stream into a feed and the content is curated and served at a single and convenient place – a website or an app.
GIJN: Google Pinpoint As a Search Engine for Documents, Photos and Video
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
ToolboxFinder.xyz
Claims to be the “wikipedia for productivity tools.” Curated by Keep Productive.
FutureTools
A treasure chest of AI tools
AnonDaddy
Anonymous email forwarding
Hourglass
A basic countdown timer for Windows
SnipClip
Screen-recording tool
How to Find Public Google Docs (and Slides, Forms, Sheets, and Drawings Too)
GetGreenshot.org
Capture screenshots of web pages.
Screenshot.guru
Capture screenshots of web pages.
Snag.gy
Capture screenshots of web pages.
Fotor Background Remover
An AI background remover can automatically remove image bg in smooth cut out way without any manual work. It helps edit pictures–journalists need photo editing tools.
Cleanup.pictures
Edit things out of photos quickly with this browser-based tool
Companies.tools
App stacks of some of the top tech companies in the world. See what tools they’re using.
Synthesia
Create Free AI videos from this browser-based tool.
PDF 24 Tools
Edit, merge, split and convert PDF documents
Hypothes.is
Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere, including social media annotation.
ClipDrop
Capture anything around you on your phone and drop it onto your laptop seamlessly.
Google Jamboard
A free, simple whiteboard tool. Great for group brainstorming.
Figjam
A free whiteboard tool.
Padlet
A digital bulletin board that works well for teaching. Install as a Mac app or use in browser.
Glitch
A good tool for managing data journalism projects.
Noun Project
Add icons to your presentations, sites, etc.
Milanote
Digital bulletin board tool.
EasyRemote
Collaborate with your remote team and get better at what you do with a simple, intuitive tool.
Sunsama
A good day-planning app
NewsFlow
An application that lets you share stories from all over the world. Create your own news by adding photos, videos, text, and links to other sources and share instantly with your head office.
Routine
A solid calendar/planning app
Cloudapp
Record your screen as a video with your voice & face, an annotated image, or a GIF and instantly share it as a link to get your point across. Works for Mac, PC, Chrome, iOS, etc.
Email-Meter
Too much email kills focus. Analyze your inbox and prioritize what’s important.
Listy
Phone app for creating and sharing lists.
Wonder Tools
A great newsletter from CUNY’s Jeremy Caplan on all types of productivity tools for journalists and others.
Almanac.io
Document creation tool along the lines of Google Docs.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
WunderPresentation
Load a link from a Trello board, Notion, Markdown, Figma, etc. into this browser-based tool and it converts it into a slideshow presentation.
TubeBuddy.com
Chrome extension that tracks analytics on YouTube videos.
Scribe
This tool automates the creation of how-to guides via a desktop app or Chrome extension. Users follow a process on the web or in tools they use, this app records clicks and keystrokes and turns it into a guide with text and images. Guides can be shared internally or externally, and embedded in web pages or wikis. This tool is helpful for educators who create digital tools guides, and community- and solutions-focused journalists can speed the document creation process to better help their audiences.
Calendly
Schedule meetings without back-and-forth emails.
Copy.ai
Just type a few words about your product and CopyAI does the rest. It’s like having a legion of copywriters spoon-feeding you ideas and crafting copy that converts. No more writer’s block, missed deadlines, or stale copy.
Soundslides
The audio slideshow tool is back with an upgraded HD version.
Copysmith.ai
Create high-converting ads, product descriptions, emails, and more in seconds – never start from a blank page again. Paid but has a free trial.
Adobe Essential Documents & Organization Tips for Freelancers
The Fix: How to Easily Turn All Your Articles into Audio Articles
Genial.ly
Create charts, infographics, timelines, presentations and more. Set up a free account in seconds
Facebook Video Downloader
Be careful with copyright issues.
Workflowy Project Management Tool
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Machine Translation
Provides access to all available machine translation engines for journalists to easily translate their work into the target language with the best results.
Linktree
Popular with social media users who want to list all of their accounts in one place.
Unpaywall
Want to avoid paying for academic articles? Try this free and legal browser extension which simply monitors the internet for an alternative source where a paper is free.
FlipHTML5
Publishing platform for magazines, zines and other pubs.
Beautiful.ai
Create cool presentations.
Genial.ly
Great interactive video and other multimedia through the templates in this desktop app.
AlternativeTo
Type in a name of a piece of paid software and the site will give you a free alternative. Example: Type in Photoshop and it will give you a list of free, browser-based photo editors such as Fotor.
Remove BG
Remove a background from an image quickly with this free browser-based tool.
OneTab
Google Chrome and Firefox extension to organize browser tabs.
Audio Hijack
Record any application’s audio, including VoIP calls from Skype, web streams from Safari, and much more. Save audio from hardware devices like microphones and mixers as well. You can even record all the audio heard on your Mac at once! If you can hear it, Audio Hijack can record it.
Diagrams.net
Good for building flowcharts and other basic graphics and static charts.
Sketch Together
Work remotely on a whiteboard with anyone, anywhere.
GIJN Guide: Business Tools for Newsrooms
Productivity and management tools for small newsrooms, including communication, management, file sharing, audience engagement, data visualization, security, passwords and more.
Murmel
A social media aggregator. It saves researchers and journalists the time and effort of scrolling for compelling material on Twitter. Instead, Murmel carefully bundles news and trending items shared by one or more of their Twitter friends. The result is an informative and compact daily email digest. Free 30-day trial and pricing plans as low as $5 after that.
50Hacks
A list of 50 great current productivity tools, voted on users.
12 Ft Ladder
Insert a link to an article behind a paywall and read it for free.
Beeline Reader
Makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable. Uses a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes through long blocks of text.
Muzzle
A simple Mac-only desktop app that mutes any sound notifications while you record.
The Artificial Creativity Landscape
More than 180 AI tools in a downloadable PDF. Just click on the icons to find your next AI tool for creative and knowledge work.
How to Search Closed Caption Text on YouTube
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Machine Translation
Provides access to all available machine translation engines for journalists to easily translate their work into the target language with the best results.
Newslit.com
Personalized and easy-to-digest news briefs based on your topics of interest and/or Twitter network.
Minelead.io
A technology solutions company that has developed a cutting-edge email finder and verifier tool. It helps to find professional emails for any company or website and verify their quality through a browser extension, API, or web interface.
ComputerWorld: Seven Best Tools for PDF to Excel Conversion
Sharon Machlis reviews the best tools for converting the files.
The Wayback Machine
A new version of Archive.org that searches screengrabs of old website designs.
Naptha: Capture and Copy Text from Images
A great browser plug-in.
Zapier
Connects your apps to help your workflow become more efficient.
Whiteboard Fox
Share a whiteboard in real-time on any web browser.
Scrivener
Great for storyboarding, planning and organizing a deep story.
Zmurl
Event-hosting site for Zoom. Similar to Eventbrite.
Klaxon
A tool that alerts journalists when online content changes.
Design Hornet
Post your publication to the web in a magazine/publication format.
Air
Great for organizing a photo workflow. Search, share, etc.
Tally
An easy-to-use forms tool.
UppBeat.io
Download rights-free music.
Lose the Very
Gives you synonyms to words to help avoid using the word very. It’s VERY effective.
TeauxDeaux
As its name implies, this to-do list desktop application that is simple and easy to use.
ToDoList
Another organization tool that’s easy to use.
Training Videos: 30-Minute Skills
The New England First Amendment Coalition presents a monthly educational series featuring short, practical lessons on journalism and the First Amendment. The program — called “30 Minute Skills” — provides reporters and other citizens knowledge they can use immediately in newsgathering, data collection, storytelling and other areas of journalism and First Amendment law. The lessons are featured in a 30-minute format to accommodate the demanding schedules faced by many working in New England newsrooms.
UnDraw.co
Find free illustrations
Cardsmith Digital Stickyboard Tool
What You Need to Know: Embedding Videos into a Site
PDFtoExcel.com
A free web-based service for extracting data tables from regular and scanned PDF files into fully editable Excel spreadsheets. Email address is not required; converts PDFs of any size and does not impose any limits on the number of files that can be converted for free. It can come handy to investigative and data journalists for extracting tabular data from PDFs to .XLSX format for free, especially when working with the big tables.
Open Source Intelligence Tools Handbook (OSINT)
An exhaustive list of current digital research tools– social media, phone records, data scraping, crypto, site-mapping, image search, dark web, etc.
Sidekick
Work OS based on the Chromium browser. Designed to be the ultimate online work experience, it brings together your team and every web tool you use – all in one interface.
Zoomcorder
Virtually attend any Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, WebEx, Goto Meeting, Goto Webinar video meeting. Get a recording sent to you of the meeting for later viewing and archival purposes.
Run the World
Zoom but with some upgraded features and more lively interface. Drop in polls, set up “cocktail party” chats and more.
Excalidraw
Free drawing tool that lets you build cool charts.
Docs Online Viewer
Chrome plug-in that lets you view and document right in your browser.
GlideApp
Create an app in a Google Sheet in five minutes. For free.
SpeakPipe
Receive voice messages from your audience directly from your website.
Dropmark
The smart way for teams and individuals to collect, organize, and discuss anything on the web.
ExportComments.com
Easily exports all comments from your social media posts to Excel file.
Downdetector
Monitor when your favorite services are down or having problems. Good for tracking outages on social accounts, government sites, etc.
Pitch
Professionally designed templates in this cool presentation slide-building tool.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Brainshark
Convert Powerpoints into online videos. Free and paid models
FlipSnack
Record your PDF as a slidecast.
ImageMagick
Create, edit, compose, or convert digital images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 200) including PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, SVG, PDF, DPX, EXR and TIFF. ImageMagick can resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.
WeVideo
Video editor, screen recorder, meme-maker, green screen and more. Good for editing social video and has templates for Facebook and TikTok. Plans start at $5 a month but it has a free trial.
TurboCollage
Photo collage-maker app for your laptop.
EasySub
EasySub is an automatic subtitle generator that provides the most refined automatic subtitles and free subtitle translation on the internet. It helps journalists transcribe audio and video faster, and can perform simple video editing, providing functions such as adding watermarks, modifying video resolution, video format and background color.
Humaans
Create royalty-free illustrations with a variety of skin tones, body types and backgrounds.
Discord
Topic-based channels where you can collaborate, share, and just talk about your day without clogging up a group chat. Good option to Slack.
EtherPad
A good alternative to Google Docs.
YouTube Audio Library
Find hundreds of rights-free music tracks.
PageMark Browser Extension
The PageMark add-on for Firefox helps journalists gather, document, and annotate source material for reporting. Make highlights as you read articles in the browser, annotate those highlights, then save your work to a local file so you never lose track of the most important bits of primary documents again. Once saved, notes may be edited or added, and highlights may be tagged, rated, and filtered so important archived information is always just a few clicks away.
Video.EtherPad
Add videos to your EtherPad documents.
TinyMonth
Single-page view of the year ahead.
Top 10 Timeline-Making Tools
Free and paid resources.
Sourceful
An index of useful Google Sheets and Docs.
ClipChamp
Free in-browser video editor, compressor and converter.
What You Need to Know: Embedding Video
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Captricity
A low-cost data crunching tool that can be used to cheaply process paper forms into digital data.
oTranscribe
Web app to transcribe audio interviews.
Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer
Breaks down photos to show what photoshop work or alterations have been made. Also has a browser button to sort right off the page. Type in link or upload the photo from your desktop.
How to Embed Vertical Video from YouTube or Vimeo
Five Free Tools for Finding and Verifying YouTube Videos in News
CountWordsFree.com
Web site helps to calculate main text statistics. Text entered can always be saved in proper format. Even PDF documents can be loaded and analyzed.
SendSpace
Send/share large video files.
Ifttt.com
Organize your social media and other online accounts.
Re: Format Gmail Inline Quoter
For gmail users who run chrome, it helps you break up replies to long emails by making a quick highlight+push-button flow. Helpful for email-heavy workflows, and the formatting we insert makes the quoted sections pretty obvious.
latakoo
This tool makes it simple for journalists to securely share video, photos, and audio files over any Internet connection. latakoo handles large files fast and preserves great quality.
Tr.im
Shortens URLs and provides diagnostics/stats on hits.
Timeline Setter
Tool from ProPublica.
SpeedTest
Check the speed of your internet connection.
Able2Extract Professional
A PDF converter, creator, editor and more. Convert .PDFs into Excel.
Notion.so
Great all-in-one workspace tool.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
WeTransfer
Send and receive large files.
Github: Haccer Tweep Scraper Tool
Promo Free Image Resizer
Similar to Landscape from Sprout Social, you can drag an image into this browser-based tool and resize images to fit various social platforms.
Wunderpresentation
A free tool that lets you create a deck automatically from a Notion or Trello link or markdown text.
Lex.page
AI text-generation tool.
Copy.ai
AI text-generation tool.
Knight Lab: Beginners Guide to Collecting Twitter Data
Scraping Expert: Best Way to Scrape Data from Twitter
Damon Kiesow: Tools to Improve Your Research and Writing Workflow
MediaCloud
Suite of tools for analyzing media use.
Event Registry
Collects and analyzes news articles published by more than 30,000 news publishers worldwide.
ViewDNS.info
A reverse lookup of WhoIs.net. You can locate a site by registrant.
AwesomeScreenshot
Do screen captures of your browser.
Dead Link Checker
Free and paid versions to help you fix/remove bad links on your site.
Start.me
Build a personalized productivity page.
Screen.so
Collaborate with others like you’re in the same room. Screen-sharing tool that lets you work with colleagues on each other’s screens.
Alfred
Keeps a mini-archive of the last 100 things you’ve copied. Useful if you copy/paste a lot.
Airtable: Journalism-Related Database Tools
Airtable Chrome Web Clipper Extension
Coda: Create Collaborative Docs
FlightEra.net
The database collects flight data and tracking information to generate statistics around aviation. Using data from different sources, we try to provide information not available on other sites. The site uses a variety of freely available data to generate the information. Those include airlines, airports and tracking data from planes. We are always looking for additional information so please get in touch if you would like to provide your data.
How to Set Up a Secure Phone
David Koff’s Medium post walks you through the steps. Important for investigative reporters and international correspondents.
OSINTCurious
Lots of information, tutorials, webcast on finding and verifying information.
Writer.com Free Grammar Checker
Pitch.com
Build killer slides and presentations.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
Xmind
Mind-mapping tool.
Audemic
A powerful tool that enables researchers to save time and organise their knowledge. Upload a paper and it will create audio of the paper.
Zotero
A free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite and share research.
Mailbird
Manage multiple email accounts in one place.
SameDiff
Compares two or more text files and tells you how similar or different they are. Good for catching plagiarists.
Genially
This site lets you tag photos with audio and a lot more.
Osf.io
Free, open platform to support research and enable collaboration.
Bellingcat Online Investigation Toolkit
Promo Free Image Resizer
Similar to Landscape from Sprout Social, you can drag an image into this browser-based tool and resize images to fit various social platforms.
Distill.io: 15 Successful Journalists Reveal Top 3 Productivity Tools
Distributed Newsroom Playbook: Technology and Tools
Resources and tools for remote newsrooms.
Projector
Design tool for social media posts, slides, infographics and other visual elements.
Figma
Figma helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish.
Sketch
Create, prototype, collaborate, and bring your ideas to life with the design platform used by over one million people — from freelancers, to the world’s largest teams.
PikWizard
Thousands of rights-free stock images.
Typeform
Creates an online test that engages your colleagues, pupils, or friends. It creates multiple choice test or exam and inspire learning in a fun and engaging way.
Elementor
Tool for building WordPress themes. Free and paid versions.
For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.
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