Welcome to the Wonder Tools newsletter. Every Thursday morning I share useful tools with you and 2300+ other subscribers. Thanks for reading. — Jeremy Caplan
This week, I invited my friend and colleague Mike Reilley, author of the great newsletter Journalist’s Toolbox🧰, to share a few of his recommendations. Mike has taught Google News Initiative tools sessions to more than 4,500 journalists and educators. He and I are collaborating this week. I’m writing an upcoming post for his newsletter, which has excellent resource recommendations for journalists. And he’s sharing tools, below, for you!
MIKE: I’ve been updating the Journalist’s Toolbox site since January 1996 — yes, the site is older than some of you reading this — and have been teaching digital journalism for the same amount of time. So I thought I’d share a few of my favorite tools with you here, and I hope you’ll take a second to subscribe to my free newsletter, which publishes every other Tuesday morning.
Google Earth Studio: Create 3D images and flyovers of buildings and the natural environment in this easy, free, browser-based tool that produces high-end video renderings. Exporting is a bit tricky and you’ll have to convert it into an .mp4 or .mov in a conversion tool or video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro, but the final result is worth it.
(JC: You can use it to create a point-to-point video showing the journey between any two addresses you select, like this):
Spreadsheets: The NY Times has posted its spreadsheet training resources for free.
Data search: Google Dataset Search is the first tool I use when searching for datasets. It’s easy to use and allows you to filter by date, cost, file type and more.
Video, podcasting and audiograms: Use Wavve.co to turn your podcast or musical audio into animated videos to share on social media. Cleanfeed is a free tool that offers multitrack, multi-party live audio and recording using only a browser. Also: Kapwing is a free and simple online video editor. Add subtitles to videos, turn articles into social media, combine clips together, edit recordings and turn audio into video.
Airtable: Jeremy has shared this tool before as a productivity tool. I also like it as a searchable/filtered database tool, which how many of my data journalism students at the University of Illinois at Chicago use it. It offers a variety of table templates beyond just sharing raw data. It has project management templates specific to video and other digital projects, and you can add many design and color-coded features to the tables. Embeds easily into a site and has great filters and search built-in.
Here’s a training video on building basic databases in Google Flourish (beginning of video below) and Airtable (starting at 10:40):
Time Capsule — One of my all-time faves… type in your birthdate — or any date you’re interested in for that matter — and get a digest of news headlines, top song titles and other timely factoids covering that era. You can do this with Google, but this site offers more detail and flexibility.
GovernmentAttic.org provides electronic copies of thousands of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Whiteboard video — Sparkol makes some really cool online tools but my favorite is a tool called Videoscribe that helps you make whiteboard videos. These are little sketch videos where a hand draws items on a screen to tell a story.
I think of them as live cartoon panels that tell a story. It’s a particularly effective tool for showing a process, like mail-in voting. Here’s a training video on how to use it:
Mike: I always end my newsletters with a quote about journalism. "I think that having a job in journalism, despite all of the changes, is still a fantastic way to be — make a living observing your society and having a chance to use your voice." — Ellen Goodman