Most of this freedom to go where the story takes me is due to Evernote. I’m a little surprised TFR haven’t covered it yet, since it’s one of those all-powerful tools that people become uncomfortably dependent on.
This week, I’ll focus just on its scanning capabilities. I used to have a little portable scanner, cutely called the Magic Wand, that I would slide over pages.
These days, all I’ve got is my iPhone and Evernote, and it works even better. Evernote’s camera function automatically detects documents when you snap a picture of them, and makes them incredibly readable as digital files. It can combine multiple pages and even make the docs text-searchable. I searched for “Oslo” in my notes today, and one of the results was this:
Pretty impressive. For a Reuters story earlier this year, I had to analyze several months of crime data from the NYPD, which, despite all common sense, they wouldn’t give to us digitally.
I trekked downtown to police headquarters, photographed a dozen pages with Evernote, and scraped the data into a table. Infuriating, yes, but not as much as it could have been without a way of digitizing the printed pages.
There’s a free version of Evernote, so it may be worth downloading even if you only use it for scanning. The app has a million other impressive features, but I’ll probably get to those another week. Shoot me a note if you’re curious, and I’ll gush some more. See you next week!