tool of the week | Editors Blog

Tool of the week: Stroome

What is it? A free online video editing tool which allows you to collaborate with others

How is it of use to journalists? When it won $200,000 of funding in last year’s Knight News Challenge, Stroome’s ambitions as a useful tool for broadcasters were outlined:

Through the creation of a virtual video-editing studio, this project hopes to simplify the production of news video by enabling correspondents, editors and producers to upload, share, edit and remix content with others. This will reduce the need for expensive satellite truck technology.

Stroome is handy if you find yourself working on a computer without editing software (there is also YouTube’s online video editor) although most people will no doubt favour editing within an application rather than within a browser due to the speed of upload and processing.

Stroome offers interesting possibilities to work collaboratively with others, not just journalists. One idea is that local news sites could encourage readers to upload footage of a severe weather event and collaboratively build a video using Stroome.

Share your ideas of how Stroome could be used by journalists and news sites by leaving a comment below.

Tool of the week: Batchgeo

What is it? A free mapping tool. Simply paste data from a spreadsheet and see it plotted on a map.

How is it of use to journalists? Journalists who cannot code and have no technical knowledge have a wide range of tools available to them for plotting data and creating maps.

You can have a go yourself by copying and pasting data into Batchgeo. Here is a list of the most populous countries in 2100, based on United Nations predictions. (You can see the data displayed as a heat map and find out how to use Google Fusion Tables for mapping.)

Here is a regularly updated spreadsheet on Nato attacks in Libya.

Here is a list of Bristol City Council wifi hotspots.