Apps and technology in general are playing an ever-increasing role in the field of journalism, to the point where a journalist’s phone is slowly increasing in certain essential apps that help make navigation of the online world easier. From keeping up with the news to having a photo editing app for quick touch-ups, there are certain apps a journalist needs to help make life easier! So whether you are studying to become a journalist or are already in the field, these 10 essential apps are a must have to help make things easier.
If you’ve ever done a phone interview, you probably know the struggle that ensures in trying to record the call on a secondary device and hoping the audio is clear enough, or trying to speedily take notes. If you haven’t experience this yet, good news, you’ll never have to with TapeACall. This will record the phone call as you make it, so that afterwards all you have to do is upload the audio file to transcribe it.
If there is one bane of being a journalist, it’s the long process of having to transcribe an interview. Depending on the length of the interview, you may find yourself spending hours or even a few days transcribing each word spoken. Thankfully, Happy Scribe was invented to save the day. All you have to do is upload the audio or video file, and Happy Scribe turns it into a completed transcription, so all you have to do is pull whatever quotes you need or edit it into a completed article. Simple!
Have you ever tried going back through an hour or longer interview trying to find that one juicy quote you remember hearing but can’t for the life in you remember when it was said? Every journalist has gone through that at least once (or more) in their career. However, TimeQuote lets you log points during an interview so that you can come back to them later and easily find what you are looking for. Goodbye painstaking playbacks!
This one is great if you are a news journalist, a freelancer, or just ensuring you are up to date on the latest news. BriefMe takes all the latest trending news, entertainment, health, and compiles it into all the necessary highlights for you to easily scan. Regardless of whether you use this to inspire new story ideas or follow-ups, it’s always important for a journalist to be up to date on all the latest news.
WhatsApp is perfect when you have a ton of people you are constantly talking to or need to keep in touch with. You can text, call, video chat, and send documents across the app, and because it uses WiFi, you can save yourself some monthly phone expenses by using this!
Most journalists will carry around a trusty notebook and pen to keep in emergencies or to jot down ideas, but it’s never a bad idea to have another backup means of taking notes. Evernote covers this by providing a simple app that lets you take notes, create task lists, and organize everything neatly and all from your phone. It’s handy if you find yourself swapping between paper and electronic means of taking notes.
If you are on the go and working from your phone, but are trying to upload videos and articles, the last thing you want is to have to pull out your laptop and use precious time to edit that video you just took. Thankfully Quik provides an awesome means of creating social media friendly videos with a phone interface that is really easy and uncomplicated to use.
Hydra (not that Hydra) is the photography version of what Quik provides. This will let you take high-quality photographs on your phone, even with bad lighting, to ensure you are getting the quality images you need. If you haven’t invested or haven’t been able to invest in a good DSLR camera and only have your phone, then this is the best go-t0 option.
This app makes the perfect companion to Hydra, by allowing you to edit your photographs with filters, resolution changes, cropping, or whatever you need to do to make them publishing ready and all from your phone. Enlight is simple to use and can even let you get really creative with some of the editing options, depending on what field you are in and what style of image you want.
For investigative journalists, journalists with highly-sensitive documents or interviewee’s who are strictly off the record, ProtonMail is a very important app if you are looking for a secured end-to-end encryption service to keep things private and off-grid. You can create an anonymous account, and the encryption will keep things secure and private.
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