Every journalist knows that each moment of the day is precious, and far too many of those moments are spent on tedious tasks. Jeremy Caplan, author of the Wonder Tools newsletter, shared 23 tools on Wednesday to help “empower us [and] enable us to work more efficiently and more creatively.”
Caplan discussed a variety of digital tools to help journalists boost their productivity, spend more time on creative aspects of their work, and free up time for themselves and their passions. He mentioned several tools with similar functions that are available at a variety of price points and with some different unique features. The general goal was to minimize time spent on “menial tasks that we might have had an assistant do, but if we don’t have a human assistant you might want to use the virtual assistant.”
One hot topic for Caplan was bionic transcription, which uses AI to not only transcribe audio but summarize it or convert it into multiple formats. Two key tools Caplan discussed were Oasis and AudioPen. He believes that journalism is entering a new age of organizing thoughts with recordings of one’s own voice.
“Everything can summarize everything, it seems like these days, but they do at different levels of quality,” Caplan said.
Caplan also praised Superhuman, a tool for one of the most tedious aspects of journalism: emails. The Superhuman website calls it the “fastest email experience ever made.” The streamlined platform provides sender information, allows you to record things such as signatures and it uses AI to build responses. Caplan acknowledged the price is high, up to $30 a month, but is arguably worth the money for some.
Caplan shared his love of creating slides for a variety of purposes and provided many tools to aid with the task, including Beautiful.ai, iA Presenter and Gamma.app.
He advised using Craft.do and Coda.io to create interactive documents. Both can be used to design clean, organized documents that make it easier to track your thoughts and creations. He actually used Craft.do, which he called “thoughtfully crafted,” to create the digital handout available to attendees, recapping the session’s content.
Caplan will be repeating the session on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. for anyone who missed the first presentation and wants the scoop on the tools.
