Category Archives: Tool of the Week

Tool of the week for journalists – Spool, an Instapaper for video

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Tool of the week: Spool

What is it? Spool is like Instapaper or Read it Later for video. It allows you to to save videos to watch later.

How is it of use to journalists? How many times have you come across a video on a news site or YouTube when you don’t have the time to watch it?

Spool allows you to save videos you’ve found during the day for viewing later. And what is great about it is that it records the video, allowing you to watch it offline, perhaps on the train home from work.

It saves it in HTML5 so videos or documents that started as Flash can be viewed on an Apple device.

Spool is not just for video – it allows you to save any webpage – but it is video that sets it apart from similar platforms for saving news articles.

You can also add the option of saving the videos, articles and documents to Dropbox or Evernote.

Spool has iPhone/iPad and Android apps to access your saved videos and to allow you to save more.

It is still in private beta and requires you to apply for an invitation. These appear to be sent out almost immediately.

Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter

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Tool of the week: ProPublica’s TimelineSetter

What is it? A tool for creating beautiful interactive timelines.

How is it of use to journalists? Having spent time developing a timeline tool, US investigative journalism news site ProPublica has made the code available for others to use, enabling journalists to build interactive timelines from a spreadsheet.

ProPublica’s timeline on how one blast affected five soldiers is a clear demonstration as to just how effective the tool can be in online storytelling.

The LA Times and Chicago Tribune are among those who have utilised the open source software since it was made public in April 2011.

TimelineSetter is not for the technology shy, however. Non-coders should not let this introduction to the tool put them off and should instead try watching the two videos embedded below and test out the technology.

Let us know at @journalismnews if you build and publish a timeline using ProPublica’s code.

If you want to create a timeline but avoid coding, try Dipity, a previous Journalism.co.uk tool of the week.

Hat tip: 10,000 Words

Tool of the week for journalists – The Interviewr

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Tool of the week: The Interviewr

What is it? A tool to schedule, record and archive interviews

How is it of use to journalists? The Interviewr has been designed for journalists. It allows you to schedule phone interviews, add notes and questions you want to ask, record and store the audio, and upload related files.

Free to use, the Intreviewr uses Twilio to power the recording of phone calls. After entering your phone number (with a +44 at the start, if you are in the UK) and the interviewee’s number (again with the country code), both will receive a call at the scheduled time and the conversation will automatically be recorded. You will then be able to download it and play it back.

The Interviewr is still in beta and is developing a subscriber service. There is also an iPhone app (priced at £1.99), allowing you to start the interview and playback the audio from your phone.


Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories

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Tool of the week: Rippla

What is it? A tool that allows you to monitor the social media “ripples” of a news story

How is it of use to journalists? Rippla was launched last month as a tool that tracks how news and information reaches into people’s conversations on social media.

It may be interesting to find out that the story with the most “ripples” is currently the Mail Online’s Hilarious video shows cat stroking crying baby and sending him to sleep, followed by George Monbiot’s Guardian comment This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, But what is particularly helpful for journalists is the ripples tracker.

Ripples tracker allows you to enter the URL or a news story and see how many times it has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and find out how many bit.ly click-throughs the post has received.

Rippla also offers news sites a widget than can be added (as embedded below), which displays the most socially shared news stories.

Most popular news stories

Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search

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Tool of the week: Facebook Search

What is it? A tool that allows you to search Facebook without logging in

How is it of use to journalists? Social media searches have become a key part of newsgathering process. This tool is a search engine for Facebook. It allows you to search if you are not logged in of if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Based on Facebook’s API, it allows you to search posts, photos, people, pages, groups and events.

As well as being useful for searching by keyword, it is also a good way to test to see if the page for your news site comes up in a search.

Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets

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Tool of the week: Buffer

What is it? A tool that allows you to schedule tweets

How is it of use to journalists? How many of your followers saw the last tweet you sent? As Twitter is a scattergun approach to sharing news, it is likely that most followers will have missed it.

Buffer is a tool that allows you to schedule tweets, posting them at selected intervals throughout the day. You can select Buffer’s suggested tweet times, which are based on research, or you can choose your own times.

Buffer could be helpful to news organisations who want to post a story, such as a feature or blog post, several times. It could also help in crowdsourcing, tweeting a request more than once.

According to Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich, who spoke to Journalism.co.uk and is quoted in this guide on how to: best post news on Twitter and Facebook, news organisations should tweet each story three to five times: for example once when the news story goes live, once a couple of hours later and then a third time the next day.

That’s very much a use case of why we built Buffer, but this is what we do for our news stories and blog posts. We drop all the stories we have into our buffer and they get well spaced out over the day and get posted so that we always have a different audience that will be able to see the tweet.

  • There will be a session on social media optimisation and how to best time tweets and Facebook posts at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired – media in motion conference for journalists. The news:rewired agenda is at this link.

Tool of the week for journalists – Playground, to monitor social media analytics

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Tool of the week: Playground, by PeopleBrowsr.

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts.

How is it of use to journalists? “Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground,” PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains.

Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities.

These features – and many more – let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject.

Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists.

Grill added:

The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community.

You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowsr, gave an inspiring speech at the Strata Summit in September on how a TV ratings system such as Nielsen could soon be replaced by social media data thanks to the advanced online analytics that PeopleBrowsr offers.

 

Playground’s development is based on feedback from its community of users, which has been very responsive. Ideas can be sent to contact[@]peoplebrowsr.com or by tweeting @peoplebrowsr.

Tool of the week for journalists – Greplin, to search your private files and profiles

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Tool of the week: Greplin

What is it? A private search engine for your personal files and social media accounts

How is it of use to journalists? Greplin allows you to search your Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox accounts in the same way as you would use Google to search the web.

Recommended by Amy Webb at US journalism conference #ONA11 as “a way of sort of defragging your brain”, Greplin is a tool that can help journalists find a key piece of information in a second or two.

For example, you may be working on a story about a company or subject and have information in emails, your Dropbox account, Google Calendar and LinkedIn. One search in Greplin will allow you to surface the source documents and references to the company or topic.

The basic subscription is free and includes those accounts listed above. You can unlock services such as Delicious by tweeting about Greplin, and there are some services, such as Evernote, only available with Greplin Premium.

There is a free iPhone app and also a browser extension for Chrome, which is well worth adding. This enables you to search your files simply by prefixing your query with a “g”.

 

Tool of the week for journalists – WhenToTweet

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Tool of the week: WhenToTweet

What is it? A tool that allows you to work out the best time to tweet

How is it of use to journalists? 

Automated tweets or those reporting breaking news cannot be timed. But when is the best time to engage with your followers and get noticed on Twitter?

In a recent interview for a podcast on how to best time your tweets, Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a platform that allows you to queue up tweets and post them at optimal times, explained that it is best to tweet when there is a lot of chatter.

When the most traffic happens and when the most tweets go out its the best time to tweet, which is sometimes counter-intuitive.

This tool works by both by monitoring the performance of your past tweets and tells you when most of your followers will be online. The best time for @journalismnews to tweet is 11am, according to this tool.

For more Twitter advice see 10 technical Twitter tips for journalists.

Tool of the week for journalists – Trendsmap, for tracking conversations in your area

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Tool of the week: Trendsmap

What is it? A tool that maps Twitter trends in real-time.

How is it of use to journalists? Reporters can follow trends based on a subject or location.

The map option (as shown in the below Trendsmap of Brighton) allows you to see what people are talking about in a particular area in real-time, making it a handy tool for local reporters.

The list view of keywords and hashtags (shown below) is also a good way of finding sources in an area and connecting with those people.

There are limitations, however. Mapping relies on tweets being geolocated and as the majority of people choose not to share their location, it greatly reduces the number of tweets picked up by the tool.

Trendsmap also has custom trends pages, such as this one for Formula One. Journalists writing about specific subjects such as sport may find these pages useful.

As well as acting as a tool to hunt for stories and trends, journalists can also use it to help them when sharing their stories via social media. For example, adding a relevant hashtag to a tweet can increase its reach as more people find it and share it.