Investigative Journalists Share their Favorite Reporting Tools

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• For secure communications: Signal, Protonmail, and VeraCrypt.
• For data extraction: Google Pinpoint, Tesseract, and Google Sheets.
• For visual forensics: Google Earth Pro, TweetDeck, and youtube-dl.
• For social media analysis: WeVerify Twitter SNA, NodeXL, and CrowdTangle.

If seeking tools for specific topics or functions, another approach is to browse for tools by category in a comprehensive open source apps dashboard — for instance, the BBC Africa Eye Forensics Dashboard, the Marc Kranat OSINT Dashboard, or Craig Silverman’s Verification Handbook.

And if you need guidance and use-case context on emerging techniques, another great option is to search or browse GIJN’s Tips & Tools library and the GIJN Toolbox series.

But, often, reporters simply stumble upon tools as they go along — whether new or well-known to others or designed for other industries — which over-perform their expectations, and become instant favorites.