From notetaking to storage: Nine apps journalists should know

Livescribe SmartPen

Livescribe’s Pulse SmartPen is a standard ball-point pen with a built-in microphone and digital audio recorder. It stores hundreds of hours of audio in memory and works all day on a single charge.

The SmartPen uses infra-red to digitally copy notes handwritten on special notepaper. The copy downloads to a PC via a USB cradle. Software links audio and note data so you can use your notes to move back and forth through the audio by selecting words and bookmarks on the notebook page or on its digital onscreen version.

Recording interviews is new to me. Before the Livescribe SmartPen I relied on shorthand. It's barely readable, but efficient. In 30 years I’ve never been accused of misquoting anyone.

Yet this US$150 device changed the way I work, especially when covering formal press conferences, roundtables, seminars and conferences. I sometimes use the SmartPen for interviews, but often go back to shorthand – a skill I don’t want to lose.

Livescribe’s main drawback is the need to use expensive, specialised notepaper, but that’s a small price to pay for the convenience. Every journalist should at least investigate the SmartPen.

MyScript for Livescribe

This US$30 add-on software turns my Livescribe handwritten notes – perhaps scrawl would be a better term – into digital text.

MyScript is far from perfect, the error rate can be high, especially when I’m racing to take down notes or revert to my old school shorthand. There are times when pages are gibberish. I can report it is more accurate than the first Apple Newton MessagePad and not as reliable as the later models. However, when it works MyScript saves time when writing longer stories.

Microsoft OneNote

I’m not crazy about Microsoft Word – I mainly use it to stay compatible with everyone else in the media–alternatives can frighten editors. If I could find a better option, I’d move.

On the other hand Microsoft OneNote, which also comes bundled in some versions of Microsoft Office, is essential.

Microsoft designed OneNote for tablet computers – and can take audio and electronic ink – I use it as a data depository on my desktop and synch my OneNote files to my laptop. That way I store all my important reference material once. I use it to clip text, pictures, movies or even complete web pages from the net, incoming email and other digital sources.

Evernote is a great alternative to OneNote. It does a better job of capturing online data and the auto-tagging feature is neat. It works better with smartphones than OneNote – that’s something that may cause me to jump ship in the near future.

WordPress

This website was built with WordPress. It is not a full-blown content management system, but it is the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to create professional-looking sites and there’s a fantastic support community along with hundreds of useful plug-ins. Learning WordPress isn’t for everyone, but is a great entry point for digital publishing.

Gmail

Having one inbox on my desktop, laptop and smart phone is essential. I switched sometime ago from Microsoft Outlook and, with one exception mentioned below, haven’t looked back.

Linkedin, Rapportive

Gmail’s weak spot is contact management. It isn’t useless – it works well on an Android phone – but it is second-rate compared to Outlook’s excellent contact manager.

Linkedin is a great fact-checker for getting correct name spellings, job titles and so on. Unlike any other contact management tool, it stays up-to-date when people move jobs – or at least it does when the people update their entries. I’ve also found it a source of news stories – when someone moves between companies.

Rapportive provides timely information on the people communicating by email and pulls Linkedin and other social media data into Gmail.

Scansoft Paperport and Omnipage

Nuance’s Paperport is a powerful tool for the paperless journalist. It stores digital images of paper documents. Some of them I keep as raw images, others I covert to PDF format and send another set of documents to OneNote. Eventually I’ll have them all in a single place.

Scanning paper and sending it directly to OneNote works well, so that may prove the better option long-term. Meanwhile PaperPort integrates well with Omnipage – an optical character reader. Sometime I need something able to handle bigger newspaper pages: Microsoft Image Composite Editor gets the job done.