RECENT UPDATES

IRE Journal: Sources and Sexual Harassment: Advice for Reporters and Editors

BBC Blogs College of Journalism: How to Record a Phone Call on Your iPhone

Student Reporting Guidelines During COVID-19

A list of tips for educators and students.

Center for Journalism Ethics: A Guide to Less Extractive Reporting

CJR: How to Cover COVID-19 Patients Sensitively

JEA: A Guide to Conducting Remote interviews

How to Tell Good Research from Bad: 13 Questions Journalists Should Ask

Great tipsheet from Harvard’s Journalist’s Resource.

NY Times: Satellite Images and Shadow Analysis: How The Times Verifies Eyewitness Videos

Contact Out

Find anyone’s email or phone number. You can add it as Chrome extension too.

Hunter.io

Type in a web address and get a list of email addresses of people within that domain. Great for hunting down TV station email addresses.

Inteltechniques.com

Track people down through their Facebook ID.

Other reporting tools and resources

CJR: How to Cover COVID-19 Patients Sensitively

Journalist’s Resource: Recording Phone Calls and Conversations Legal Guide

Cites resources from the Citizen Media Law Project.

Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide

Dart Center: Reporting on Coronavirus: Handling Sensitive Remote Interviews

Journalism.co.uk: Develop New Interviewing Techniques

IJNET: How Journalists Can Better Approach Victims of Disaster

The Art of the Confrontational Interview

For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.

Navigating the Hate Beat

Slides from IRE 19 on how to cover hate groups and other issues.

Cleanfeed

Multitrack, multi-party live audio and recording using only a browser. Tool is free.

RTDNA: Identifying Juveniles in Stories

Poynter: How Journalists Can Become Better Interviewers

Seven Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free

Center for Journalism Ethics: A Guide to Less Extractive Reporting

Usersearch.org

Find the person behind a username, email address or phone number.

Bellingcat: Top Phone Contact Book Apps for Your Mobile Phone

Apps such as TrueCaller or GetContact advertise the ability to see who is really calling you, even if you do not know the number.

MapChecker

Based on Google Maps, it helps journalists to estimate the number of participants at demonstrations or events.

SaveMyNews

Personal, permanent clipping service for digital stories from Ben Welsh of the LA Times.

ICFJ: Nine Remote Interviewing Tips for Journalists

For more training videos, visit our YouTube page.

Zencastr

The easiest way to record your voip podcast interviews in studio quality.

Covering Extreme Weather: What to Avoid and How to Get It Right

Tip sheet from Journalist’s Resource at Harvard.

Save My News

Built by Ben Welsh of the LA Times, you can save your online content with this desktop app through the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine).

These videos were created by the SPJ Education Committee. Here’s a playlist of all of its training videos.

Sources and Keywords: The Fundamentals of Online Newsgathering

The fourth book in First Draft’s series of Essential Guides looks at the tools and techniques for finding newsworthy material online.

BBC: How to Record a Phone Call on an iPhone

Interviewing Politicians and Public Leaders: Advice from TIME’s Molly Ball

14 Google Tools You Didn’t Know Existed

Poynter: 7 Tips for Conducting Better Interviews with Scientists</p

The Base Trip

All the information you need while traveling including visa requirements, currency, electricity, communication info and more.

Muckrack: Guide for Journalists Covering Protests

Local News Lab: Guide for Local Newsrooms

Student Reporting Guidelines During COVID-19

A list of tips for educators and students.

Washington Post Training Videos: How to be a Journalist

Series of videos on basics of reporting, FOIAs and more.

Remote Recording Tools

Tips, software and tools for recording remote interviews.

20 Tools That Will Make You a Better Freelancer

10 Rules for Reporting on War Trauma Survivors

Tips from Harvard’s Journalist’s Resource.

IRE Journal: Sources and Sexual Harassment: Advice for Reporters and Editors

IJNET: 5 Interviewing Tips Every Journalist Needs

Dimensions.Guide

A comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world.

FOIMan

Tips and tools for making successful FOIA requests.

Mapillary

A street-level imagery platform, powered by collaboration and computer vision. Use it to find user generated pictures of a variety of countries and cities.

Everybody In: A Journalist’s Guide To Inclusive Reporting For Journalism Students

A “thought-provoking and practical guide to help you make sure your reporting includes your whole audience. With introductions by respected journalists setting out their personal experiences of difference – from race, gender and class to sexuality, age and regionalism.” An e-book that charges you.

InterviewJS

Turn interviews into shareable, embeddable interactive chats.

AirMedia: Remote Recording Tips and Tricks

JEA: A Guide to Conducting Remote interviews

Five Services That Match Reporters with Expert Sources

From the Reynolds National Business Journalism Center.

Hunter.io

Hunter lets you find email addresses in seconds and connect with the people. Free but you must register.

Sqoop

Gives you one place to search for company information, rather than spending hours each week conducting the same repetitive searches on a variety of public data sites.

Klaxon

Track changes on websites. Good for monitoring public records pages.

Shoeleather

A national database of local journalists from non-media hub cities. Editors, work with local journalists instead of parachuting reporters and editors in.

Nieman Lab: Dangers of Covering Environmental Disasters

Dealing with the physical and mental toll of covering wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters.

NPR Source of the Week Directory

Email Hunter

Searches for emails on a specific domain, such as suntimes.com, etc.

Dejargonizer

Tool to clean out jargon in your writing. Built for science academics but useful for journalists.

12 Useful Apps for the iPhone X

FirstDraft News Reporting Tools

Social newsgathering, verification, law/ethics. A great collection of resources.

Reynolds Center: Business Beat Basics Book

Free download.

Verification Junkie

This tool from Josh Stearns centralizes several social media verification tools in one place. Great for reporting and fact-checking on deadline.

StoryBench: A Digital Toolbox for Bringing Home the Perfect Interview

Some good recording and transcribing tools.

Covering Communities

Helpful tips for citizen journalists.

Tiddly Wiki

A single html file which has all the characteristics of a wiki – including all of the content, the functionality (including editing, saving, tagging and searching) and the style sheet. Because it’s a single file, it’s very portable – you can email it, put it on a web server or share it on a jump drive.

DeadlineOnline

From Alan Schlein. author of “Find It Online”.

FedBlog

A must-read for anyone covering politics and federal government. Daily updates on what’s going on, links, resources, etc.

Friend or Follow

A helpful database for tracking Twitter followers and to track who’s following you.

Reporting Civil Rights

CriticalThinking.org

Many useful tips and techniques.

Beat Reporting/Specialty Reporting

A Journalist’s Guide to Approaching Social Sources

Carto.com

Mapping tool.

Data.gov Tools

This government site is a tool for helping to build your own database using government statistics.

LooseWireBlog: Why You Shouldn’t Quote from Wikipedia

Great commentary on online journalism trends.

Media-Alliance.org

Training resources for the media.

Committee to Project Journalists: Journalist Security Guide

.PDF guide book to covering news in a dangerous, changing world.

Accountable Journalism

The Reynolds Journalism Institute created this database of more than 400 searchable codes of ethics from media outlets around the world.

LinkedIn.com

Good networking site for journalists seeking sources and for non-journalists looking to connect for business purposes.

SLA News Division: Surveys and Forms Section

Great resources for public documents and research.

RobertNiles.com: Finding Basic Stats Online

Reporting in Indigenous Communities

Tools and resources galore.

Transcription tools

IJNET Video: 5 Transcription Tools for Journalists

Otter.io Transcription Tool

Uses AI on phone app and desktop tool to transcribe audio for free.

WayWithWords

Transcription tool.

Nibity transcription tool

Verit.ai transcription

Transcribe Me

VoiceBase.com

Machine transcribed video tools. $50 free credits to start. Just upload audio file through the web app.

HappyScribe.co

Transcribe interviews in minutes. 10 cents per minute.

Descript

Audio word processor. Good for transcribing audio from interviews. First 30 minutes are free and paid after that.

Recordly

Transcription tool.

Sonix

Speech to text transcription tool. Free trial.

How to Use Amazon Transcribe

Walk-through from Dan Nguyen.

Trint

Digital transcription tool. $12 an hour.

Rev

Transcription for $1 per minute. Also video captioning and document translation.

Temi

10 cents a minute transcription tool comes in both a web version and iPhone app. You can use the app to record the audio or your own recorder.

WReally Transcribe Tool

Upload audio and it will transcribe the text.

Vox: Video Transcription Desktop Tool

Transcribe

A free web app designed to take the pain out of transcribing recorded interviews.

GIJN: Recording Audio on a Smartphone

oTranscribe

Web app to transcribe audio interviews.

Screencast: Using Online Tools to Transcribe Audio

Transcribe Tool

Load an audio file and you can transcribe it. Fast, efficient. Great tool for reporters doing long, in-depth stories.

Transcribe interviews with this browser-based tool, built by college students and hosted by the Google Cloud Platform.

Field Recorder

Android app that is great for recording phone conversations.

Headliner.app

This tool lets you make social media videos for free. It also allows you to export audio from video, transcribes it and drops it into video as a caption.

Amara

Caption and transcribe any video.

SpeakerText

Transcribes video/audio. Costs $2 a minute. First five minutes free.

BBC Blogs College of Journalism: How to Record a Phone Call on Your iPhone

The Best New Ways to Transcribe

An overview of 28 tools for turning audio into text. From Jeremy Caplan at CUNY. Many of his tools and resources appear on this page as well.

Related

Return to Reporting Tools | Global Reporting Tools | General Research