Digital Tools for Journalism

Tools make our journalism more powerful. They unleash our storytelling potential, unlock secrets in data, and help us share stories in new and compelling ways.

As newsroom ranks and audience attention spans shrink, tools are indispensable. Lucky for us, more and better ones are released every day.

Poynter, with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and with the support of the American Press Institute, has committed to finding, sharing and provide training around the best journalism tools. We understand that great tools can be difficult to find and harder to learn (though you’d be surprised how quickly some of them will make their way into your daily work). We’re here to help.

This page is the home for all of our journalism tools articles. For more:

Sign up for the Try This! — Tools for Journalism newsletter

Try This! — Tools for Journalism is a weekly newsletter with news, updates and tutorials about the best digital tools for journalists. Each issue features seven quick stories written with punch and brevity so you can learn what you need and get on with your day. This newsletter is for everyone, whether you’re so digital you’re made up of ones and zeros or an internet neophyte. It is published every Monday at noon Eastern Time.

Sign up for Try This! — Tools for Journalism here. Looking for something we’ve covered? Read the archives here.

Read up on the latest news on our digital tools channel

We’ve dedicated a major channel on Poynter.org to covering the latest tools, providing tips about how best to use them and plenty of other helpful advice and information. Access it here or from the top bar on any page of this website.

Learn how to use the best tools with our free digital tools webinar series

Our digital tools tutorial series offers comprehensive overviews, in-depth training, ideas and more for tools that we have handpicked from the crowd as some of the most useful for journalists. Each tutorial lasts between an hour and an hour and a half, is available at any time from any location and is completely free.

Social Media Tools

• Cultivating Local News Communities with Facebook Groups – Facebook Groups are an exciting way to build communities, especially on the local level. At a time when Facebook has deemphasized news on its feed, Facebook Groups also remain an effective way to interact with audiences and share meaningful stories with interested people. This webinar will discuss best practices in starting a topical Facebook group, how to involve your newsroom and how to keep the conversation going.

Data Tools

• Find Stories in Data Faster and Collaborate Better with data.world –  Data.world helps journalists of any expertise and career level quickly find stories in data; collaborate on data projects with colleagues and with other newsrooms; add depth, relevance and vital context to reporting; build trust with readers; and extend the life of stories.
• Build Interactive Data Visualizations with Tableau Public – In this special two-hour workshop, learn to create, publish and share interactive data visualizations using Tableau Public, a free and powerful data visualization tool. We start with a tour of the Tableau interface, connect to an example data set, create a few visualizations and then pull those visualizations together to make a dashboard.

Video and Audio Tools

• Engage Audiences with Interactive Video with Verse – Verse gives viewers the option to navigate to sidebars like interactive Q&As for valuable interview extras that didn’t fit the main story, explore multimedia slideshows with video and photos and experience non-linear stories using the Pathfinder tool. It helps viewers find their own path through stories, resulting in higher engagement and happier viewers.
• Upgrade Your Transcription and Audio Editing Workflows with Descript – Descript is a new app that harnesses the most advanced automatic transcription technology to create the world’s first audio word processor.

 Analytics Tools

• Build and Monetize Reader Relationships with Parse.ly: A Digital Tools Tutorial – Parse.ly provides digital publishers with clear audience insights to answer questions about how readers are responding to content.

Fact-Checking Tools

• Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online – Learn how to check the veracity of images using tools like RevEye and Google’s Reverse Image Search, pick apart viral social media videos with InVid and YouTube Dataviewer and assess social media profiles with Account Analysis and StalkScan.

Got a tool you’d like to pitch?

Email us to share a new tool or request training about a tool that you’ve seen.

For more great journalism tools, visit Knight Lab’s tools projects