Nonfiction
Journalist’s Toolbox
This website, maintained by the Society of Professional Journalists, is updated regularly with relevant resources for current news stories.
Jsafe
Designed for women in journalism who’ve faced harassment or abuse as a result of their writing or career, Jsafe – a collaboration between the Coalition for Women in Journalism and the Reynolds Journalism Institute – is a free app that allows writers and other media workers to report threats or violence easily and upload photo or video evidence along with a text account of what occurred. Users can also request a follow-up from the Coalition for Women in Journalism to help connect with a lawyer, a therapist, or other resources.
Answer the Public
If you maintain a blog or a website – or write for one regularly – you know how hard it can be to come up with new story ideas on a regular basis, especially if you’ve been writing about a subject for years. But one of the best ways to create useful, creative content in your niche is by answering queries from your target audience. Guess what? Your target audience asks Google their burning questions every day, and the search tool Answer the Public allows writers to easily see what people are asking search engines about any given topic. Pro users can also export each list of queries as a CSV file for future reference.
Free for limited daily searches; $99/month or $948/year for unlimited searches
Acronym Finder
If a source references an acronym you’ve never heard of, you can find out what it stands for easily at this free database of more than 1,000,000 listings. You can also search both U.S. and Canadian postal codes at the same site.
Otter
Raise your hand if you love transcription. Precious few hands in the crowd? That’s what we thought. Luckily, Otter offers 600 minutes of free transcription each month, and many journalists say the results are surprisingly accurate. You can also use it to record and transcribe a meeting in real time via Zoom.
Free for basic usage,
$8.33/month for premium, $20/month for teams
Diaro
If you’ve always wanted to be a better journal-keeper but haven’t found the time to do so regularly, ask yourself if it’s the journal itself that’s the problem. Would it be easier to keep a Diaro journal on your phone, where you can log in thoughts, moments, and memories whenever you have a spot of free time via an app? Your journal entries can be searched, sorted, or filtered by date, so you won’t waste time paging through entries trying to find a certain moment. It also syncs to Dropbox, so you can access it from any device via your Dropbox login.
Originally Published
