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.

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Sebastian Mondial was one of the first journalists entrusted with millions of leaked offshore tax files. Because of the sensitive nature of the information – which involved the secret financial transactions of individuals from corrupt politicians and international arms dealers to millionaires and middle-class professionals – secure communications among those involved in the investigation was of the utmost importance. The ensuing collaboration, involving nearly 100 journalists from 40 countries, was probably the largest in journalism history

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.

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Timelines arrange events in chronological order. From learning about dinosaurs or the order of kings and queens at school, at some stage you would have stumbled over a timeline. The point of a timeline is to make it easier to understand when things happened.

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.

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What is Findery?

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.

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