4 Essential Digital Tools for Journalists * Anna Bruno

4 Essential Digital Tools for Journalists

Try these new tools designed to help journalists with content creation, visual storytelling, and audio production.

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The design platform Canva has recently adopted generative artificial intelligence, allowing users to create images from text. The results are not always perfect, and the square format appears to be the only format available at the moment. However, you can experiment with different styles and enhance your articles or social media with some original images.

Canva

Social media. You can try the new Magic Design tool powered by artificial intelligence (Pro account), which turns text and images into customized templates like social cards. This is a really useful and time-saving tool for any social campaign.

Even more interesting for journalists, Canva is also launching some visual storytelling tools from the data visualization platform Flourish, acquired two years ago. Starting in September, you’ll be able to create interactive charts for data visualization like tree maps and clustered bubble charts. You just need to select a Canva template and enter your dataset by uploading a spreadsheet, connecting to a live source, or integrating with the API.

TinyWow

This is a smart online tool for editing and converting PDFs and solving other problems such as removing backgrounds from images, generating text and images with an AI-based tool, or transforming a video into a GIF. Although it’s not specifically aimed at journalists, having an online tool for PDFs, images, videos, and various files all under one roof can save you a lot of time and effort. This tool is completely free and states that both processed and unprocessed files are deleted after one hour.

Instorier

This is a new no-code tool designed to make it easier to produce high-quality visual journalism for newsrooms without in-house developers. You can create text, images, video, maps, 3D elements, or embed tables and charts. The great thing is it can be used for single stories, so newsrooms don’t have to change their existing systems. The tool is young, but it has already been adopted by newsrooms such as the Swiss state media RSI.ch which produced a piece for the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine invasion by Russia.

Motionbox

This is a sort of Swiss army knife for editing images, audio, and video. Motionbox offers tools like music visualizer, video cropping, GIF speed changer, video meme creator, and slideshow maker. You can also turn podcasts into videos, add text and subtitles to videos, and watermark your work. There is a limited free plan to try out the tool, and if you like it, you can subscribe to a paid version at a fairly reasonable price.

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