A 2015-2016 RJI Fellow wants to streamline the workflow in small- to mid-sized newsrooms by creating apps to assist journalists in their day-to-day tasks. These tasks could range from fact-checking and finding free images to creating immersive multimedia presentations and previewing mobile versions of their articles.

The project will put “big-media tools” into the hands of media professionals and freelancers who don’t have access to large programming teams, says Barrett Golding, a Web developer from Bozeman, Montana.

During his residential fellowship at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Golding plans to release a suite of apps — Storytelling Tools — built to work within the WordPress content management system (CMS), which hosts thousands of news websites, says Golding.

“We want to go where journalists already are, rather than ask them to log in to a new service or download a new app,” he says. 

Before building the suite of tools, Golding will survey news organizations to learn more about their digital workflow and identify areas most in need of improvement, then focus on making open-source plugins that serve those needs.

The next phase will test the plugins to optimize the user-experience. Collaborators will include partners from the University of Missouri, RJI and several national journalism organizations. The testing will allow Golding and his team to refine the tools suite and prepare it for free public distribution.