What is the iRig app?

These days, journalists with smart phones have a wide array of tools to use in their reporting. For those who need to record and send audio, the free iRig Recorder app for iOS and Android is worth checking out.

I had never heard of the iRig Recorder app until Austrian public broadcasting, ORF, called asking me to do a Q&A on post-election protests in Cambodia, where I’m based. “Sure,” I said, but pointed out that I didn’t have a land line (as relatively few in Cambodia do) and that the audio quality of a mobile phone interview might leave a little to be desired.

No problem, the producer said, pointing me to iRig Recorder, a nifty app that, while not perfect, offers pretty good sound quality, a simple interface, and lots of sharing options. The ORF producer and I could talk via Skype and I would use the app to record my answers and then send the audio to Vienna.

I downloaded the free version from iTunes (it’s also available for Android), and was initially a little worried seeing the middling reviews there. But the ORF producer seemed enthusiastic.

Easy to use

The app has an intuitive interface. On opening it, you’ll see a screen with a large blue RECORD button near the bottom. One touch of that and you’re on. A large time display shows how much you’ve recorded and you can stop the action with the PAUSE button, then start up again where you left off. At the bottom on the screen, a waveform is generated as you record so you can make sure the sound is coming through. I thought the levels seemed pretty low, but found there was a way to boost things later.

When you’re done, touch RECORD again, and you’ll get a list of the recordings on the phone. The default name is the date and the time of the recording. But the app lets you give each recording a unique name if you want. Just tap the file to type.

Then, hit the blue button next to the date and a processing screen opens up. On the free version, your options are limited to boosting your levels. But iRig allows you to determine what percentage you want to the increase the volume and whether you’re working with speech or music.

There are a bunch of optional processors available, such as tone optimization, cleaning up background noise, slowing the speed and changing pitch, among others. But the processing package costs $4.99. If you want to edit what you’ve recorded, you’ll also have to shell out a little cash. Trimming and making internal edits will set you back $4.99. Or, you can buy a package with all the added functions for $7.99.

I didn’t need any of that, since I was sending over my audio to the Austrians, and they edited out my stumbles at their end.

Sharing is simple

Once I’d finished my recording, I hit the EXPORT / SHARE symbol at the top of the file list screen. I could email the audio, use iTunes file sharing, share it on a local wi-fi network, FTP it, or upload it to SoundCloud. Most options gave me the choice of exporting high-quality (.wav file, 44.1 kHz), medium-quality (.m4a file, 96 kbps) or low-quality (.m4a file, 32 kbps) files. The email option limited me to an .m4a file.

ORF had sent me their FTP settings beforehand, and my three-minute Q&A went over fairly quickly, despite my less-than-stellar internet speed.

As you might expect, the audio is not going to be exactly studio quality. You are using your smartphone’s mic, after all. But I found it acceptable, and of course so did Austria’s ORF.

The company behind iRig, IK Multimedia, makes a slew of accessories. The ones most interesting to journalists are the compact microphone that plugs into your phone’s audio jack and a larger handheld version. But they’ll cost you around $30 or $70 respectively.

The downsides

The iRig app is free, so you can’t expect perfection. Some complain that the paid add-ons are almost a necessity to get the quality and flexibility you might need. There is some truth to this. And without a high-quality mic, you’re audio is not going to be top notch, granted.

Using iRig to record my side of a Skype Q&A

Plus, you can’t take a phone call and then turn on iRig to record that conversation. As I mentioned, I Skyped with the station in Europe on my computer and recorded my side of the interview into my iPhone. So you’ll need to be able to work with that limitation.

I had forgotten to put my phone in Airplane mode when I started recording the Q&A with Vienna and got a phone call right in the middle of it, which put a quick end to things and crashed the app. Luckily, we had the time to do the interview again. Be sure to always engage Airplane / Offline mode before recording audio or video with any app.

But overall, for quick recordings, and especially Q&A’s with a studio that has more advanced audio editing equipment and can fix glitches and level problems, iRig is more than adequate. It’s simple to use and has a clean interface.

What else should journalists know about iRig?

Cost: Free, but the add-on packages for audio processing, editing and other features cost between $2.99 and $7.99.

Sharing: It’s easy. You can choose email, iTunes file sharing, local wi-fi, FTP, or upload your file to SoundCloud.

Support: IK Multimedia has an online FAQ and a support contact page.

Language: The interface is in English.

Author: Kyle James

Mondial was pivotal in setting up the communication channels and ensuring that the information exchange avoided surveillance. In the following guest post for onMedia, he gives some tips on how to protect communications from snooping eyes while still keeping the information flowing.

There is much uncertainty and doubt (and perhaps fear) about whether it’s possible to keep any collaboration among reporters, editors and sources secure these days. Based on my experiences with the global offshore-leaks project and similar international endeavors, I want to share some recommendations for setting up secure communications for collaborative projects.

But before you even start, you need to be honest about your technical skills and the situation. If you are reading this text, chances are you’re not an A-grade hacker or system administrator. You don’t need to be. But the less developed your technical skills are, the more you will need to rely on other people’s work and the less you will be able to evaluate for yourself if a solution is really secure.

Take the anonymous surfing project Tor, for example, and more specifically Tails. Tails is a ready-to-use system that allows novices to surf the internet anonymously. While such software has major advantages, the drawback is that you absolutely have to trust the source, the creators, of this system. Since Tails and Tor are open source and used by many people, any security flaws will probably be found and fixed at some point. But as long as you can’t match the source code with the software yourself, there’s a chance it’s been manipulated. (Recently this was done for TrueCrypt, a disk encryption software – you can read about it here.)

So when you lack the necessary skills, you need to decide to either:
– “buckle up” and learn the necessary skills
– trust tutorials and follow step-by-step solutions
– find/hire an expert who you have to trust from this point on

This will be the Achilles’ heel of your security concept, so choose wisely!

The cardinal question

Then you need to ask yourself the following (multipart) question: How many people need to communicate, for how long and from where, what are their roles and how much time do you have to prepare for this situation?

RedPhone – an open source encryption app

I’ll walk you through some answers to this question using two scenarios. But before I start, if you need to keep the contents of your conversations secret and can’t meet face to face, I recommend RedPhone (Android) and Silent Circle (Android+iPhone) for the time being. Both of these will keep the content of your talks safe as long as your devices/phones aren’t compromised. (Calling people does creates specific metadata – while it’s possible to avoid this by controlling and encrypting the whole connection from end to end, that is too much ground for this post to cover).

Scenario A – exchanging information among five people or fewer (assuming you don’t need to send many files)

Depending on the nature of what you are exchanging, having five people or fewer means sharing information via email is still manageable (but it does still create a large amount of duplicate text when referring and refining because email programs often just paste replies above the original messages).

First, make security a special responsibility. If you have a team leader – good. If not, choose one person to have the last word about security – a security “first among equals,” if you like. If unsure about who to chose, pick the person who’s the most sane and the most paranoid at the same time. If you share responsibility, it will degrade security, trust me.

If you’re not all working within the same company and are on different mail servers (meaning you have different email addresses – like mike@yahoo.com and claire@web.de), you should set up extra accounts on another mail server especially for your project.

The best would be a server you can trust to not be accessible to law-enforcement agencies. In Germany, for example, all email providers with more than 1,000 users are required to allow such agencies direct access to mail accounts without users knowing.

This means you will have to set up a server yourself or get a managed server (where you have the problem of having to trust the admin). You need to have that machine in a physical space which you trust won’t be compromised easily.

You can then set up the server to accept only secure (SSL) connections and use forward secrecy (also called perfect forward secrecy – you can read more about how to configure it here). This will also cost money to run – around US$25-50 a month plus the hardware lease. Security isn’t cheap if you want to have it done right. But this ensures that as you exchange information, none of the metadata is accessible to the NSA and other snoopers (read more about metadata here).

The server will be a “central point of failure” – meaning if your information there is accessed by a third party, unless it is already deleted, the invader gets it all. So you need to add a third layer of protection just in case – encryption. This will keep things secret. GPG, the open source implementation of the cryptographic software PGP, is fine for that.

Since you’re all using the same server, again, metadata will be the least of your worries because it’ll only be available to outsiders if they get on the server.

I recently started to work with PGP V2-Smartcards. These are physical cards you can use to store GPG cryptographic keys. The sweet thing about them is that you can set them up, send them to someone and people then have the encryption keys “outside” their computers protected with a pin or passphrase that is most unlikely to be brute-forced, since it locks down after three false access attempts. It also works within companies with a central IT department; they only need to set up your computer – Windows, Mac or Linux with a GPG version higher then 2.0.8 and a common reader and you can encrypt on your own.

Since we’re talking about computers – if you work in an environment where virtual and real break-ins are likely, here are some more tips.

Buy a computer in a store rather than ordering it online because the NSA is known to have diverted online purchases to install spyware on machines. Select the computer for its modularity – how easy it is to take apart because you might want to do things like remove the camera or the microphone (see www.ifixit.com for tips on taking apart devices). Set up the computer afresh with full disk encryption (here are some links to setting it up on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu).

Here are some basic pointers to setting up systems but as I have already emphasized, you need to have or acquire some skills and/or trust other people to make it really safe.

– securing one of many Linux Distributions
– hardening OS X (if you run a Mac client) –
– setting up a secure system. Note that with this, as with any other tutorial, you really need to know what you’re doing

If you set up your system like this, your activity will have very limited visibility and no metadata about the information exchange will be revealed unless the “other side” gets hold of the server.

However, if you need to send a lot of files and/or you are collaborating on a project with ever-changing information, this isn’t the correct scenario for you. See Scenario B instead. 

Scenario B. Exchanging information among six or more people and/or collaborating on a data-intensive topic over an extended period of time

A larger collaboration makes email a burden rather than a useful tool. Since it is likely different people will be communicating on different topics, and you also might have people joining and leaving the project, you need a different method of setting up secure communications.

I recommend setting up a web forum with enhanced encryption and file storage capability on a dedicated secure server. Start with a root/managed server as described above. Then set up a forum like fud-forum and harden the system. If the machine has the necessary CPU power, you can also reuse it as a mail server as seen above. On top of this, you could enable a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which will add an encryption layer.

By doing this, you can then communicate and keep records in a central location while also being able to control the level of information accessed by those involved. In the offshore-leaks collaboration, we had a core group who were able to access all information as well as a reporter group who only had specific access to certain information relevant to their areas of expertise or their countries. People who were new to the forum could read all communications on their access level chronologically as well as in “thread-mode,” meaning that they could see questions and answers.

If we had needed to, we would have been able to shut down the whole system and make the data disappear at any point. An advantage of such a system is that you can also make a complete “private” copy at the end of the project as a reference.

I know this post has only scratched the surface of some of your secure communication needs. The good news is that there is a wealth of great information out there on the internet about making your communication server even more secure.

One more thing – there is no such thing as perfect security. Forget it! But you can reduce the chances of being snooped on or your information compromised. Once you have some knowledge and set up the system, you need to maintain your level of security and keep an eye out for any possible breaches.

If you have any questions or need more pointers, I’m happy to help – I just might need some time to respond. You can email me on kappuchino@h2h.de or you can get in touch with me on Twitter at @kappuchino.

Sebastian Mondial is a freelance data journalist who works mainly for German state broadcaster NDR in the investigative research team. He is also one of the founders of the first full-time data team in Europe – the regiondata desk at German press agency dpa. When he’s not busy crunching data, he also trains journalists on security and data journalism.

There are plenty of Internet tools to help you create a timeline, but one tool that is popular with media organizations is TimelineJS.

What is TimelineJS?

TimelineJS (Java Script) lets you easily link to different multimedia sources. So as well as text, you can include videos from YouTube and Vimeo, audio from SoundCloud, photos from Flickr, Tweets, Googlemaps and Wikipedia entries and more. Scribd is also useful for including text documents.

Other media are regularly added so check with the TimelineJS website to see what else they support.

As a result, TimelineJS makes it easy to visually show events and the interactivity means users can explore further if they want to.

How can journalists use TimelineJS?

Timelines can be used to show the chronology of any event, from the history of the struggle for Apartheid in South Africa to post-election violence in Kenya. To give you an idea of what it is all about, I created a short timeline showing the first West African countries to gain independence.

As you can see in our example, the slides incorporate video, audio, photos, Wikipedia entries and a Tweet.

If you or your media organization follow a story over a period of time, you can also use your own text, photos, audio and video linked together in a timeline.

While there are no limitations on what you can use the tool for, as it says on its website, TimelineJS is best used with short texts and “strong chronological narratives. It doesn’t work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline”.

Several news organizations have used the tool to present information about murder or missing people cases that are otherwise overwhelming in detail. For example, the small Salt Lake Tribune did a great job of putting together an interactive timeline about the disappearance of American women Susan Powell. Compare it with a text version.

The Knight Lab have a list of examples of how journalists and news organizations have been using the tool.

Here are also other examples from TimelineJS (not necessarily journalistic ones).

How can I create a timeline?

It’s very easy to make a timeline with the Google spreadsheet template provided by TimelineJS. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to sign up for the service (you can do this with any email).

You fill in the spreadsheet with your dates, text and links.

IMPORTANT – I originally had some problems getting the dates to work in the spreadsheet. This is because they have changed how the dates are read by the TimelineJS tool. All you need to do is click on the A column, then open the Format menu → Number →Plain Text.

You can see the spreadsheet I used to create the West Africa Independence timeline here.

More details are on the TimelineJS site or watch the tutorial below.

What else should journalists know about TimelineJS?

Cost: The software is free.

Support: There’s an excellent TimelineJS google discussion group where you can get help and support.

Languages: The software is currently available in 41 languages, including French, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Arabic. Click on the ‘More Options’ button in Step 3 to get to the language options.

WordPress: There is a WordPress plugin available.

TimelineJS was developed by Zach Wise, a photojournalist and multimedia producer who is currently an associate professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Wise is also a former staff member of the New York Times multimedia team.

Author: Kate Hairsine

Think of maps and digital Post-It notes. Findery lets you pinpoint places on a map where you can leave simple multimedia notes for other people to discover and share. Notes are mainly text, but can also include audio, video or a photograph from Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram and Soundcloud. Findery is also social. You can follow and like other users or the locations where they have left notes and have a conversation about a place.

How can journalists use Findery?

Notes could be stories. Journalists could use Findery as a platform for producing and sharing their stories. Findery notes might be attractive as a digital space to publish or re-post stories about a particular location.

In a way Findery reminds me of the BBC World Service Save our Sounds project from a few years ago. Listeners were asked to upload audio files to map of the world.

Take a look at the example we produced about a fire in a government office block in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Along with a brief text story that gave the essential details, we used a video clip to illustrate how firefighters were struggling to contain and put out the fire.

But before you start getting too excited about producing elaborate multimedia stories bear in mind that you can only embed either one photo or one type of media into your note. This is a bit limiting. Findery says that may change in the future but it’s not currently “on our roadmap”.

If you’re producing a lot of notes you can organise them under sets, or create keyword tags. This might be useful if you’re producing a lot of notes about a particular place.

As it evolves Findery could also be a research source drawing upon the information and stories people share in their notes about locations. For example, if you were researching punks in Berlin, you could enter a search for “punks+berlin” to see if there are any specific or relevant notes.

Perhaps going a step further, journalists could also leave a note on a location requesting users to help gather information or stories about a particular place.

And there is also a Findery Directory where users are curating and collecting notes on particular places, people or ideas. This is something we like.

What else should journalists know about Findery?

Costs: Findery is free.

Sharing and embedding stories: You can share Findery notes via Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Findery also generates an iFrame embed code for websites and blogs. From their FAQ:

“The iframe defaults to 500 x 400 pixels with a single pixel grey border. If you’re comfortable editing HTML, you can change the size, border width and color to suit the design of the site you’ll be displaying the note on.”

Languages: Findery uses the UTF-8 coding so most major language characters should work. The interface is currently only available in English.

Are you using Findery in your newsroom? Send us some examples via Facebook, Twitter or in a comment below

Author: Guy Degen