Interactive: Apps and tools for the mobile multimedia journalist

Here are the contents of the multimedia kitbag used on a day-to-day basis by Christian Payne, also known as his online alter-ego @Documentally.

Click on the markers and play the SoundCloud links to hear more about the technology.



"Make every mistake possible," Payne advises anyone who is curious about multimedia storytelling.

"If you are worried about recording video because it might not look right, you're never going to learn how to do it well.

Starting his career as a photographer for a weekly newspaper, Payne now works freelance as a documentary filmmaker and trainer in digital storytelling, in addition to writing about technology for the Guardian.

At a recent multimedia storytelling workshop in Brighton, Payne shared his tips for creating engaging content with a specific focus on mobile technology. He also talked to Journalism.co.uk about the contents of his kitbag, which you can hear more about using the interactive image above, created using ThingLink, one of the tools he recommends later in this article.

One of his key tips for getting into multimedia is to look at the skills you already have and see how you can combine them in new ways.

"If you're more comfortable doing audio and images than video, audio slideshows are incredibly shareable," he said.

When it comes to sharing text or curated stories online, he says the length of the story tends to determine the format.

"If I can tell a story in a tweet with a photo, I will," he said. "If I can add a bit more to that and put it on Tumblr, fine. If I want to do something more in-depth, newspaper or magazine article length, that normally goes on my self-hosted Wordpress blog."

Multimedia apps

When it comes to apps, Payne said that his toolkit "changes all the time", although he is a big fan of AudioBoo.

"AudioBoo will enable me to share audio, photos, text and geographic data in one go and that's a lot of work being done by the app on my behalf – all I have to do is capture a conversation, save, name it, add a photo and upload."

He also defined Twitter as "the backbone" of everything he posts to various platforms.

"Everything I do online goes through Twitter, unless I don't want it to," he said.

For photography, Payne recommends the Camera+ app and Flickr, where he says "you can post one or two photos and it's like you've created a web page".

For video, a "really amazing tool" is Bambuser, he says, which offers live-streaming via a mobile phone or webcam.

And for recording and editing audio on mobile, he likes Hokusai, which Journalism.co.uk recently covered as an app for journalists.

Payne also recommends choosing key audio, photo and video apps and keeping them on the home screen of your device so you have easy and fast access to them.

Curation tools

For curation, Payne highly rates Storify, which allows users to search and add content from a range of social platforms, plus their own comments, in real-time. 

However, he recommends exporting your finished Storify as PDF so you always have copy if the platform disappears, or any curated social posts are edited or deleted.

He also likes the interactive platform ThingLink, because there is "no end to what you can do with it". Journalism.co.uk recently published a screencast on how to use ThingLink.

We have used ThingLink to add audio soundbites to the image of Payne's kitbag at the top of this article, to share more of his thoughts on the key tools and tech he uses on a regular basis.

Last but not least, in multimedia stories, Payne recommends putting photos at the top of the page where they will grab the readers' attention, followed by audio and geo-data mid-way down, and video at the end "because people are taught by TV not to read-on after video".

Credit: Toolbox image by image by JM. Some rights reserved.

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