I’m going to reveal a secret even my wife doesn’t know. I love all those random lists of gift ideas everyone sends leading up to Christmas.
Twenty-five gifts for the traveler you know. Your golfer husband will love these five items. Impress your wife with these 10 thoughtful treats. Or, how about the best 53 Christmas gifts for everyone on your list? I can’t open them fast enough, even though they rarely relate to me or the people I know.
I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps in the cold world of algorithms we live in, a hand-curated list of randomly loved objects is a surprisingly warm blanket. Possibly deep down, I’m trying to win at the holidays by finding surprising gifts for people. Or maybe I’m still mourning the loss of Sky Mall more than a decade after it printed its last magazine.
Regardless, as we near another Christmas, I’d like to offer a guide to some of my favorite things in journalism right now. I hope these ideas will inspire ingenuity in your newsrooms. Maybe they’re projects you can snag and localize in your area. Perhaps it’s a tool that will help you finish your next reporting project. Or it may be an entertaining waste of time as you put off calling the next source on your list.
What’s going there in Delaware
In 2019, The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, launched a Facebook group with a simple goal: to use Delawareans to help the newspaper’s journalists highlight and identify development projects throughout the state.
What began as an experiment has grown into an engagement hub, with residents throughout the state regularly asking about construction projects in their neighborhood and what stores are going into new shopping centers and vacant storefronts. With more than 89,000 members (nearly 10% of Delaware’s entire population), that adds up to a ton of leads for News Journal reporters to shake down for potential stories.
The engaged audience also means The News Journal has a consistent audience for stories focused on development across the state, a real win-win for readers and the newsroom. And it’s an idea that can be easily replicated in just about any community in the country. After all, everyone wants to know what’s going on down the road.
Consistently one of my favorite reads, Jeremy Caplan’s free newsletter has a knack for cutting through the noise and focusing on what’s practical and helpful at the intersection of journalism and new tech.
Caplan, the director of teaching and learning for CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, launched the newsletter in April 2020 to help both journalists and educators navigate the world of remote work forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 300ish posts since, Caplan has avoided flavor-of-the-month coverage and prioritized utility and usefulness. One great example is his widely shared focus on Google Docs shortcuts and tricks. (I still type “doc.new” in the address bar to create new files, a hack I first read in Wonder Tools.)
In one of his recent newsletters (which also has a paid option unlocking more features), Caplan offered an overview of an often-overlooked use of chatbots like ChatGPT — deep research, where you can set up the tools to search and gather information, links and ideas from dozens of websites, sorted into a neatly curated list. Some practical applications include easily backgrounding companies or individuals you may be writing about, or using it to dig deep on specific buildings, neighborhoods or other locations.
Visualping
If you cover local politics or specific organizations, this website-monitoring tool might be a time saver.
Visualping automatically tracks changes to the webpages you select and sends alerts when updates are published. It’s beneficial for reporters covering governmental agencies that sometimes quietly post information on their websites without notifying the public, much less reporters. It can be used to track any website to monitor businesses, court decisions or even corporate staffing moves, and it can keep one eye on organizations that don’t update often enough to check every day.
Azmat Khan, a contributing writer on The New York Times’ 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning series exposing civilian deaths in the fight against ISIS, used Visualping to track air strike videos that the United States and coalition forces posted or removed from government websites.
“I’d ask them, ‘Did you conduct an airstrike on this place?’ and sometimes they’d tell me ‘no,’” Khan told the Global Investigative Journalism Network. “That was how I was able to uncover that they weren’t logging all of their own coordinates.”
The membership tiers can get expensive, but Visualping offers a free plan for journalists, allowing reporters to monitor up to 25 pages at a time with 1,000 monthly checks.
Brick
Brick is for any journalist out there like me who avoids finishing a story by wasting time on what my kids would call brain rot.
I got turned onto Brick by the fine folks at Wirecutter. It’s a small puck designed by a pair of young college graduates that pairs with an app on your phone to block all the apps you wish you could say “no” to, all while allowing your phone to function normally.
The way it works is you tell Brick which apps you want to block, tap the small puck, and voila — you can no longer distract yourself with mindless TikTok videos or by endlessly swiping up on Instagram. The only way to unlock the apps is to tap the puck again, meaning if you leave the house, you won’t have access to those apps until you return home.
Elissa Sanci at Wirecutter reviewed Brick and said, after testing it for just two weeks, “I feel my attention span regenerating, and it has given me hope that I can actually break my phone addiction.”
Not ready to spend money to stem your addiction? Create a little friction by deleting the time-wasting apps from your home screen. They’ll still be accessible on your phone, but it’ll take a little more effort to find and open them, making it more likely you’ll put the phone down instead.
The best things we ate this week
I’m giving my colleagues at The Philadelphia Inquirer a quick shout-out about this terrific weekly feature, which is as direct and straightforward as it sounds.
Each week, The Inquirer’s features desk compiles a list of meals staffers ate across the Philadelphia region that week, complete with photos and brief descriptions of the restaurants and dishes. It’s easy to put together, invites reporters on different desks to contribute and try something new, and it consistently performs well, both by attracting news readers and serving the newspaper’s paying subscribers.
Best of all, it’s another one of those simple ideas any newsroom in the country can steal and adapt to serve their community. Most newsrooms don’t have the resources to support a local food critic on staff. (We’re blessed at The Inquirer to have one of the country’s best — Craig LaBan.) Adapting this idea would be a great way to highlight local restaurants and build community each week.
Another great weekly feature The Inquirer produces, adaptable for other newsrooms, is a deep dive into the newspaper’s past, highlighting stories that resonate with readers or touch on current events. Some recent examples include the story of a notorious gangster who eluded capture by hiding at his mother’s house, or the time a firecracker at the Spectrum injured Aerosmith rockers Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
Lightning round
For years, I’ve kept a browser tab navigated on Coffitivity, a free website featuring prerecorded background noise from coffee shops around the world. My two favorite AI-powered apps are the transcription tool Otter and Hunter.io, a Chrome plugin for finding email addresses on a company’s website. (ChatGPT is surprisingly good at finding a source’s email address as well.) The New York Times Cooking app is so good that I often wonder if a localized version run by newsrooms in other cities would work. Would people in Chicago be interested in recipes by local Chicago chefs? They might be.
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. You can reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.
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