Five Free Apps Journalists Need to Know
As an audience engagement producer, I am constantly looking for new sites, apps and tools to share with fellow journalists to help them do their job. Below is a list of five tools I use regularly as a journalist. They each have both a mobile and desktop version which makes them easy to use in the office or in the field.
Each app is also free, and I mean free that you can actually get enough out of it and doesn’t make you sign up for a 7 day trial. Each of them also offers a subscription option which you might find valuable.
Canva
I’m known around the block as a “Canva Queen,” because of how much I love this app. There is both a mobile and desktop version which makes it very easy to use. I primarily use it to make social media posts for Instagram but it also has a basic video editor which helps add a little more flare with text for social/short-form videos.
I love the collaboration aspect of being able to work on a project online and share a link instead of having to export and send a file to someone.
It also offers some basic photo editing tools for changing the brightness, saturation, etc.
It does not replace the Adobe Creative Cloud, but it’s definitely become a staple for social media managers.
I’ve also used it to create presentations that have a little more flare than the Google Slides templates and for updating my resume.
Yes, there are some features you don’t get out of the free option such as background remover from images and video and being able to easily resize projects to different dimensions but overall the free account is enough to get started.
Adobe Lightroom
If you didn’t already know, the Lightroom mobile app is free to use! There are some tools you can only get with a Creative Cloud subscription, but it's a great way to be able to edit photos on the go. You have access to the same tools you would for light, color, effects and details. Plus if you want to bulk edit you can copy and paste the settings or import presets.
CapCut
If you’ve spent enough time on TikTok, chances are you’ve seen a CapCut template. This is a free video editing app for both mobile and Windows in addition to a web version. If you’re like me and edit a good amount of videos for social media, this app makes it very easy to do. I tried out a few different mobile video editing options over the years; Videoshop, iMovie, Adobe, and this has by far been my favorite. The options are basic and simple but they get the job done.
Grammarly
To be completely transparent, I just thought to check if there is a mobile version of grammarly. Turns out there is! How fun! You can allow it full access to your keyboard or if you’re hesitant on that you can type what it is you want looked over into a document in the app.
Do I think you should entirely rely on Grammarly to do a proofread? No. But it helps to get your attention on spelling and grammar errors that Google or Microsoft might miss. Plus it might save you an email from a reader notifying you of a typo you made.
Otter.ai
Otter was one of the first tools I learned about as a journalist. I had been going through the painstaking process of transcribing an interview, only being able to handle a sentence at a time, looking over my notes for specific time stamps in the hopes the quotes I remembered delivered. Then a peer told me about Otter and I asked “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this sooner?”
So what is Otter? Basically, in real time Otter can transcribe audio. It has both a mobile app and web version. The free option is more limited in how much time it will record for, how long the recordings are available and how many transcriptions you can record each month. With the free version, you also aren’t able to upload previously recorded files.
Bonus: Google PinPoint
Unfortunately, there is not yet an app version of this or else it would have been officially on the list. Google PinPoint is through Google’s Journalist Studio. It offers similar features to Otter.ai of being able to transcribe audio for free. You can also upload handwritten documents or images and that it can transcribe.
