Michelle Kanaar and Alyssa Schukar created the Visual Journalism Toolkit for local newsrooms. The toolkit includes sample contracts (photographer, videographer and illustrator databases, ethical stock resources, a list of reputable resources on ethics, what information to include for assignments and examples of opportunities for using visuals to promote newsroom engagement and fundraising.

“Studies show that images impact emotions faster and more powerfully than words, in that stories with visuals garner 94% more total views,” Kanaar said. “Unfortunately, many local news organizations lack dedicated visual staff.”

Kate Myers created Excellence.is, a sustainability tool, to help news leaders build better strategic operations for independent news organizations by identifying needs and gaps in their current structure and process.

“I wanted to help leaders shore up their organization by really helping them prevent the worst failures and address the biggest operational pain points,” Myers said. “I know from unfortunate, painful experience that when operations fail, everything else tends to fall apart as well.”

Alex Partida built the Article-as-Homepage toolkit for independent local news publishers. This toolkit helps local news publishers rethink the article page to better serve today’s audiences and better meet business needs. The system of design helps you present reporting in rich, multimedia formats, provide audiences with the utility once held in homepages, and include pathways to collect first party data and encourage conversions to deeper forms of support.

“With only about 17% of our traffic [at Partida’s employer, The Salt Lake Tribune] coming from our homepage, we quickly realized that optimizing the article page is going to be incredibly important for audience engagement and the business as a whole,” Partida said.

Andy Lee Roth built Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists. This resource helps develop journalists’ ability to understand the functions, consequences, and ethics of algorithms in a digital age. A core focus of the project was to help independent journalists and newsrooms whose digital content has been subject to shadowbanning, demonetization, and other forms of online speech filtering that restrict them from reaching a wider audience.

“Algorithms are the essential building blocks for a host of AI systems that are revolutionizing news,” Roth said. “Every news worker, regardless of their specialty, needs dome degree of algorithmic literacy for the ability to understand and critically evaluate algorithmic systems.”

Aura (Auralee) Walmer built the Data Sonification Toolkit for applying data sonification — the process of turning data into sound and music — to journalism. It contains step-by-step guidance for creating data sonification projects and a wide array of resources to do so, with the purpose of making data sonification feasible for all journalists to implement.

“This method presents a perfect opportunity to jake data journalism more accessible and emotionally impactful,” Walmer said, stressing that sonification doesn’t have to be as technically complex as it might sound. “If you’re interviewing folks and you have that recorded content, that’s something wonderful that you can include in your sonification. It doesn’t have to be this purely tool-based output.”

Katherine Reynolds Lewis built a freelancing quick-start guide for independent journalists, based on a business-of-freelancing curriculum that arms freelancers with the knowledge and skills to reach financial and emotional sustainability. In this guide you learn the key insights, challenges and decision points in building a freelance business model.

“The goal of this guide is to shorten the timeframe from launching a freelance business to reaching sustainability, so that freelancing becomes a more viable path for journalists,” Lewis said. “As of 2021, according to Pew Research Center, 34% of journalists were freelance, and we suspect that number has only grown since then.”

Zoli Csernatony and Dana Amihere built DigInThere. This tool gives newsrooms an automated, customizable and verifiable way to reward their audiences for meaningful reading and interaction through short engaging quizzes on news content.

“We know we live in a society of skimmers — you swipe left, you swipe right, you swipe up because you get tired of things,” Amihere said. “This is trying to be an answer to how we get readers to stick with our content; not only to stick with it through the end but to actually take in what it meant.”