My spring semester at UIC just wrapped, which means I’m scrambling to help with final stories for The Red Line Project and filing grades. So I decided to share some of the recent tools I’ve added to the Journalist’s Toolbox. I hope you’ll find them useful:
LLM Journalism Tool Advisor Answer some questions in this tool and it will build a base prompt for you to use in an LLM. Built by Joe Amditis at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, this tool is useful for people learning how to write base prompts (I use it in my classes).
You can compare and contrast strengths and weaknesses of various LLMs and read case studies on how journalists have used prompts in projects.
Duck.ai From the folks at DuckDuckGo. Free and private, anonymized chats. You can choose the model, including Claude and GPT.
Kagi Customizable search experience. Good option to Google. Allows for highly detailed filtering with specific searches and produces robust results.
Style Guide for Covering Communities of Color Newsrooms can produce culturally competent copy with a single prompt now that The Pivot Fund has uploaded the publicly available style guides of the leading journalism diversity organizations into popular AI tool ChatGPT.
Raw Graphs Free, open-source tool for creating charts and graphics.
Firefly Video Model Adobe’s AI video generation tool has been added to the Firefly image tool.
Beatoven AI AI composer for crafting the perfect background music
Alice.tech Turn generic course materials into personalized learning and exam prep
Be sure to check out the incredible production tools suite with our new sponsor at HeyNota.com
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Textbooks
The Journalist’s Toolbox
My new book, “The Journalist’s Toolbox A Guide to Digital Reporting and AI” was published by Routledge in December. You can order it here,
Data + Journalism
Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available now on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory- to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.
In Quotes …
“Responsible AI is not just about liability — it's about ensuring what you are building is enabling human flourishing.” – Rumman Chowdhury, CEO, Parity AI
