App for journalists: Bear, for taking notes and writing articles

Credit: Image by Bear

What is it?: Bear is a writing app for crafting notes, ideas and articles

Devices: iOS

Cost: Free

How is it of use to journalists?

Whether journalists are reporting out in the field or attending conferences and events, they will often need to take notes and write articles as they go.

When there's not enough time to reach for a notepad, they can use Bear to create, edit and organise notes for immediate or later use, and directly share articles in a variety of export formats, including PDF, HTML and Word.

The app also provides users with word count tools, including characters, paragraphs, and even an estimated read time for those working in broadcast.

How does it work?

Open the app and notice the notes list in the middle of your screen. Your notes will appear in order of creation here, but you can pin one to the top if you wish.

Write your articles as a note, attach a file, and send straight to your newsroom

Create a new note by selecting the red button at the bottom-left of the screen. From here, you can write your text as you wish using the various heading and text formatting options, and add images and page breaks as you need.

If you add a hashtag before a word, such as #newsrw (the event hashtag for a conference organised by Journalism.co.uk), the app will then create a folder with all the notes including that tag, allowing you to group ideas for a project you're working on.

Back on the main page, you'll see a sidebar on the left where your folders are kept, which are created through the use of these hashtags within your notes.

Looking to further categorise your notes? You can group related tags together as sub-tags by including another category in your hashtag.

For example, writing #newsrw/speakers will make the 'speakers' tab in the sidebar a sub-tag of 'newsrw', which appears as a folder for more organisation in your workflow

There's no save button as your work will automatically save as you write, so you can start and stop without worrying about losing your work.

Click the 'i' button in the top left corner to check the word count and format, and then export your note by sending it as a message, email, tweet or Facebook post.

You can upgrade to Bear Pro for £1.49 a month to unlock eight different article templates, more search criteria, and use Apple's CloudKit to sync your notes to multiple devices, so you can pick up where you left off on your iPad, iPhone and Mac.

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