This week on Tools for Reporters: View this email in your browser Find us on Twitter Subscribe to this newsletter Shoot us an email I was sitting along the water in Stockholm last week, drinking coffee and chatting with Mattius about how you can freelance anywhere these days, thanks to the plethora of apps and gadgets we've got. Last month, I got some work done while I was camping overnight under Stonehenge. Most of this freedom to go where the story takes me is due to Evernote. I'm a little surprised TFR haven't covered it yet, since it's one of those all-powerful tools that people become uncomfortably dependent on. This week, I'll focus just on its scanning capabilities. I used to have a little portable scanner, cutely called the Magic Wand, that I would slide over pages. These days, all I've got is my iPhone and Evernote, and it works even better. Evernote's camera function automatically detects documents when you snap a picture of them, and makes them incredibly readable as digital files. It can combine multiple pages and even make the docs text-searchable. I searched for "Oslo" in my notes today, and one of the results was this: Pretty impressive. For a Reuters story earlier this year, I had to analyze several months of crime data from the NYPD, which, despite all common sense, they wouldn't give to us digitally. I trekked downtown to police headquarters, photographed a dozen pages with Evernote, and scraped the data into a table. Infuriating, yes, but not as much as it could have been without a way of digitizing the printed pages. There's a free version of Evernote, so it may be worth downloading even if you only use it for scanning. The app has a million other impressive features, but I'll probably get to those another week. Shoot me a note if you're curious, and I'll gush some more. See you next week! Samantha Sunne is a data and investigations freelancer currently roving around Europe. Her current clients include the Washington Post and the American Press Institute, and current side projects include Tools for Reporters and constantly searching for wifi in foreign countries. samanthasunne.contently.com Did a friend forward you this email? Click here to sign up for the Tools for Reporters list — and get these emails in your inbox, too! Share Tweet Share +1 Forward to Friend Copyright © 2015 Samantha Sunne, All rights reserved. Tools for Reporters is published by Samantha Sunne. It was founded in 2012 by Dan Oshinsky. unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences