It’s almost 2019, reporters!
I wasn’t planning to do the yearly roundup quite this early, but the next TFR is scheduled for Christmas Day, and the one after that is New Year’s Day, so… yeah. No one is going to be reading TFR emails. In the spirit of not getting work done, here is:
Canva
I made that (admittedly lackluster) image with Canva,
which encourages you to make colorful, share-worthy images in a few
seconds or minutes. You need to pay $1 to download the final product,
but if you’re like me, and good at reporting but absolutely sh*te at
design, it’s useful for that much-dreaded self-promotion.
CrowdTangle
To feel good about yourself, you can install the CrowdTangle Chrome extension
and see who tweeted, linked or shared your story. It shows results in
order of engagement, so you can see the most powerful “influencers”
first. It works on any webpage, so I’ve also used it to find posts about
events, announcements and other reporters’ stories.
IntelTechniques
This one has the honor of actually being profiled by my friend Kevin, who wrote about how he used it to track down some government spending right here in glorious New Orleans. IntelTechniques
is a powerful tool for searching and cross-referencing online info
about somebody, like their Facebook “Likes” or their Instagram hashtags.
You can go deep.
Hunter.io
In a similar vein, Hunter.io
is probably one of my most-used tools since I always seem to be needing
an email address for somebody. If you use a few of its features in
conjunction, I’ve found Hunter.io gives you the most consistently
correct results for someone’s actual, active email address that is not
going to bounce back in your face.
SelfControl
This one makes the list for still kind of genuinely shocking me. If you have a problem with constantly visiting a distracting website, when you’d rather be working, you can turn on SelfControl. It blocks the site for up to 24 hours, and can’t be turned off, even if you – eek! – delete the app itself.
If you’re hankering for more, you can still check out the Top 5 Tools from 2017. See you next year, reporters!