5 great tools for journalists and writers

Marc and I have curated a list of tools for you that could be useful in your everyday jobs. It includes five tools that we love and that, we believe, could be useful for you too. Don’t hesitate to contact me at andre@happyscribe.co to tell us about your favourite tools.

1. OmmWriter, to write your articles

Thomas liked your status, Franck retweeted your last tweet, Lucie sent you an urgent email. When writing, it’s pretty difficult to remain focused for a long period of time. We’re all continuously distracted by social media notifications, emails or random phone calls. Well, not surprisingly this decreases our productivity which annoys us. But what are we doing about it? Not so much in most of the cases.

In the early days of Happy Scribe, we were facing the same issue when we had to write our thesis. We had to optimise our time to make the most of it. OmmWriter has been a game changer for us. This simple and easy to use editor is extremely minimalistic and really increases your writing productivity. In addition, you get nice ambience music while writing and a really addictive little noise when typing.

Link: https://ommwriter.com/ Price: $7.38!

2. Happy Scribe, to transcribe your interviews

You are probably doing tons of interviews, and you know how tedious can transcribing can be. Research actually shows that it can take up to FIVE hours to transcribe a single hour of interview. This. is. insane.

Happy Scribe is a transcription tool that use voice recognition technology to transcribe interviews from speech to text within just a few minutes. You can transcribe interviews in almost any languages and accents (+119 available to date).

By using automated transcription you can save up to three hours of work when transcribing an interview. We recommend uploading high-quality audio files to ensure that the machine accurately transcribes your interview which will result in less time spend proof-reading it. (in the future add a link to the article on how to record high-quality audio file)

Price: $0.10 per minute Link: https://www.happyscribe.com

3. TweetDeck, to stay connected

Do you want to have a better overview of what is going on in your industry? Or maybe, you just want to see how your audience react to your last article? Then TweetDeck is the perfect tool for you, you can track specific keywords or links and see all the tweets that are related to the query.

The tool can also be really useful when covering an event. It gives you the ability to see all the tweets published in real time.

Link: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ Price: Free

4. Office Lens, to scan your documents

Quite often I get documents or business cards (or even receipts) from other people and to be honest, I don’t really know what to do with it. I have tried most of the scanning apps out there. None of them really convinced me, but last week I tried Office Lens and this was exactly what I needed. It’s super easy to use and entirely free. Price: Free

5. Pocket, to save your reading list

How many time a day you pass by a great article but don’t have time to read it? Often I would say. Well, I have the same problem, for a few years now, I have been using pocket which comes with a twitter integration and a Chrome extension.Each time you see an interesting article, you just have to hit the pocket icon and the article will then be available to you within the application in a format optimised for reading and with offline access (Think about how useful this is in boring public transport commute). Moreover, Pocket will recommend you articles that people with similar interest have read. It’s a godsend.

Price: Free Link: https://getpocket.com/