Thread by @soychicka

Journalists - I've built a few tools for my own use in the past two years that I think could be of use to both investigation management & seamlessly enriching semantic content in print.

I'm curious - are there digital tools you use to manage your research to production flow?

What tools are out there that are currently used?

Scrivener?

Word + a bunch of scattered photos, A/V, pdfs, spreadsheets?

Do your newsrooms have proprietary solutions to go from research to digital publication (for print)?

I'm interested in improving discovery of both individual articles relevant to a subject over a relevant timeframe and making it simple to visualize and map out relationships between entities, individuals, locations, events, dates, etc.

Think of a tool that parses while you write, identifying subjects, locations, and marking them up with a global identity, dynamically generating both HG2G-style hypertext and network graphs from the written word that gets published to a common database when you publish.

Would help to auto-manage citations, avoid duplication of effort, improve transparency and crediting work, provide a clear path to primary sources (my pet peeve - articles hardly ever link directly to original publications about scientific research!), auto-transcription + facerec

and traversing the network of references would help to allow readers and analysts to separate quality reporting from shitty writing, propaganda and other forms of disinformation.

And there's a flip-side that would benefit publishers of print/digital media both large and small, and help local papers stay alive, and help readers find relevant local info fast, but that's another story ;)

FWIW, I've designed similar toolkits in use by law enforcement to collaborate on financial crimes, bank robberies, money laundering, etc, across jurisdictional and public-private boundaries

Of course, this is directly applicable to print journalism in terms of the end product, but it could undoubtedly be of use to those producing a/v content as well, on both the research side and releasing advance transcripts/linking video to print content and clip x-references.

So, trying to suss out if there would be any interest in a toolkit that brought together all aspects of investigations and production that would make your reporting more meaningful by improving accountability + transparency

** and if any of those impacted by last week's layoffs would be interested in chatting about seeking out funding to design and build tools to make it easier for journalists to craft and for readers to find quality, thoroughly sourced work that's relevant to their needs. **