Journalist's Toolbox Newsletter XXXVIII

Dec. 14, 2021

Dec 14, 2021

Editor’s note: This is our last newsletter of 2021. We’ll be back on Jan. 11 with our first newsletter of the new year.

My Favorites of 2021

This wraps up my 25th year working on Journalist’s Toolbox and my second writing this newsletter. It’s been a good year — much better than 2020, good grief — and I’ve discovered many new tools and heard from many of you through various social channels.

So to wrap up the year, let’s look back at some of the cool tools and newsletters we’ve shared with you in 2020:

Expert Sources: One are of the Toolbox we expanded this year was the expert sources page. We added dozens of new databases focusing on finding sources of color, including Sources of Color, People of Color Also Know Stuff, DiverseSources.org and NPR’s COVID-19 Diverse Sources.
Google Earth Studio: This tool has been around for a couple of years, and Google has been making it better in the past year by adding cloud rendering and .mp4 export options. You can build orbits, zoom-ins and download snapshots of satellite images from this browser-based tool that’s so much easier to use than Google Earth Pro (which is still a fave of mine).
Newsletters: My favorite newsletters this year weren’t even mine. They were a series written by a series of guest authors who are experts in mobile journalism: Robb Montgomery, Marc Settle and Corinne Podger. They wrote about their favorite apps for managing projects, building video documentaries and much more. On the Toolbox, we launched a new page to help you find great journalism newsletters or create one.
Search: UserSearch.org is sort of a reverse-lookup for the web. It helps you find the person behind the username, email address or phone number.

Favorite Training Video

My favorite training video I recorded this year was one for Headliner.app, a desktop tool that you can use to build audiograms and visuals for podcasts. It’s a free and very practical tool, and will help build short, visual audio clips for social channels.

You also can upgrade to a paid account and build visuals into podcasts. This is helpful if you’re posting podcasts to YouTube, and you should be as many people are listening to podcasts over YouTube.

Around the Web

Quote This Woman+
A curated database of verified women+ experts based or affiliated with South and Southern African for journalists to access and use as their sources. The database consists of experts from all industries and has been used both locally and internationally.
Skopenow
Assists with OSINT searches as a real time search engine which allows the users to aggregate, curate and report on data. The paid desktop tool uses image-recognition AI to locate objects, keywords and behaviors from narrative and visual media data sets.
DataJournalism.com: Six Data Journalism Podcasts You Should Be Listening to

Cool Tool Tuesday

Don’t forget that at 1 p.m. CT each Tuesday, we feature a new resource on #cooltooltuesday, like you see in our Around the Web section of this newsletter. Be sure to check it out and retweet it. Here’s a video of some of my past faves: