#ONAReno: Digital Storytelling Tools Tipsheet from Robert Hernandez, P. Kim Bui and Victor Hernandez
From the hottest mobile apps to productivity hacks, social media tools to camera upgrades, VR breakthroughs to digital publishing trends — the ‘three news nerds from out West’ got the band back together recently for another roundup of killer storytelling tech at the ONA Reno: Digital Storytelling workshop.
If you weren’t able to make it to the event, here’s a quick run-through of the digital tools on display.
VICTOR
Ban.jo
Banjo ingests billions of live public digital signals like emergency services, social media, traffic, weather, and many other data sources to alert newsrooms with immediate insight into breaking events happening worldwide. Currently over 1,000 media organizations are powered by Banjo to be know what’s happening everywhere, anytime, before anyone else.
Mindful
This tool has done wonders for my productivity. Bills itself as a space for your thoughts, ideas, and ongoing tasks. A Google Chrome plug-in that creates a tab in your browser accompanying you throughout your day. Based on three simple design ideas: 1) works across your devices 2) repetitive exposure 3) deliberate limitations.
Clips
Recently released social media-friendly video editing app from Apple for iOS, Clips allows users to combine videos, images and music into one seamless video ready to be shared not only via the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but also via iMessage too. True game-changer for mobile journalists is real-time caption feature for adding text to your mobile video on the fly.
Twitter Audit
Curious about how many of your Twitter followers are real? Gets way more interesting when start to examine other accounts on Twitter. This service takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends.
NOPE
This next one has little to do with journalism and everything to do with productivity and keeping on track with your work. Nope is a free Chrome plug-in that when activated, a robo call is placed to your phone, thus allowing you to shutdown distracting coworkers — usually standing between you and that looming deadline!
Populace
The app uses data from social media and other sources to display crowd densities at various locations across urban areas. As a result, the system could make it possible for journalists to find out automatically whenever an unusually large crowd gathers in a public place.
Nuzzel
I love the news curation app Nuzzel and have been using for more than a year. Receiving the daily email newsletter in my inbox as to help me focus my morning reads to begin my day has been a valuable service. The company recently introduced a ‘Nuzzel Pro’ subscription feature in the app at $9.99 a month of $99.99 for the year. The subscription offers an ad-free experience in the app, keyword filters and a dark-mode theme, with more features promised soon.
KIM
Tweeten
An intuitive and powerful Twitter experience built for those who get real work done on Windows and Mac. It’s TweetDeck, but with all the important features; customization, emoji picker, download videos, filters, seamless updates, custom css, more.
Screenie
Drag screenshots right from your menubar. The best way to capture, share, and organize screenshots on your Mac.
Highly
Save and share highlights, right as you read. Highly works on darn near every app and website.
Toby
Organize your browser tabs into Toby so you can access key resources in one click instead of seven. Toby lives on every new tab of your Chrome browser. On the right side of Toby you’ll notice that it displays all the tabs you have open within the window. The main purpose of Toby is to help tame your browser tabs, to do this simply drag the tab from the right bar into a collection in the center.
RevEye
This Chrome extension allows users to perform an inverse image search by right-clicking onto any image in a website. Choose between search engines Google, Bing, Yandex, TinEye and Baidu.
Intel Techniques Search
The Online Internet Search Tool section contains hundreds of online search resources Click any category to expand the selection. Kim walked #ONAReno through very detailed search and filter options specific to Facebook and Instagram.
Throttle
Stop giving out your email address online. The Throttle browser extension automatically generates unique email addresses for you. A button is added to all email form fields online. Instead of entering your real email address, just click the Throttle button, and a unique email address is generated and filled into the field for you. Throttle includes browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Mobile Safari on iPhone and iPad.
ROBERT
Insta360
With an Insta360 camera, users can take 360-degree photos and videos in high definition, and live-stream their experiences directly onto Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms. When viewed in a VR headset, Insta360 experiences can transport people into places and moments they’ve never before imagined.
ThingLink
What truly sets ThingLink apart is the diverse range of rich media you can easily layer on top of your content. Web link. Text. Video. Image. Audio. Social media. And now VR content.
Facebook360
With Facebook 360, publishers can showcase their most compelling stories in a new and immersive way, bringing the viewer inside a different world through 360 photos and videos. To create 360 videos, a special set of cameras is used to record all 360 degrees of a scene simultaneously. This means that when the video is playing on Facebook, viewers can choose what angle they want to see it from. On the web, this is done by dragging around the video with your cursor. On mobile devices, viewers can drag with their finger — or even just turn their device.
Periscope 360
Live 360 video on Periscope allows a broadcaster to go live and share their entire surrounding environment, making the broadcast as immersive as possible for viewers.
ZapBox
ZapBox is an affordable way to experience Mixed Reality and Room-Scale Virtual Reality using the power of your smartphone. The ZapBox app displays the live feed from your smartphone’s camera so you can see what’s around you in the room. The magic part is that it can also display virtual objects that appear anchored to the real world, so you can change your viewpoint by simply moving around.
VR Tipsheet
VR Journalism Tipsheet: a collection of tips, links and resources to help you better navigate through the emerging world of virtual reality and journalism.
DigitalStory.Tools
An handpicked list of insanely awesome tools and resources to help you build your digital story. Super helpful resource list — broken down in rich multimedia format, with a subscriber list feature to keep you in the loop with adds and updates.
This important context was shared during our #ONAReno session and is probably a great way to help close out this list of new digital tools:
Tell us what we missed! Leave your recent journey into new tools in the comments section and fill us in on other interesting pieces of innovation you’re excited about.
