Investigating with Notion

Free yourself from Google Drive! There is a much more powerful and enjoyable way to organize your research, namely with Notion.

Drive is a filing cabinet, Notion is a workspace.

These are things you can do in Notion (but not in Drive):

• Provide your documents with additional information (metadata), such as source, type, date;
• Organize and select documents based on this metadata;
• Display documents in a table, board, timeline, gallery, or feed;
• Store documents together with their sources;
• Create links between documents or text fragments;
• Add comments to text;
• Add project management functions such as task lists, assignments, reminders, timelines, and calendars;
• Write your story within the same system where you manage the sources and facts

In Drive you store documents, in Notion you build the story.

Of course, Notion also offers all the advantages of Drive:

• an integrated AI bot that allows you to ask questions about all documents in your project;
• the ability for team members to collaborate smoothly in databases and documents;
• complete offline access;
• apps and software for all devices;
• free and paid subscriptions;
• the same high level of security as Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud

The word 'Notion' translates as 'idea' or 'concept'. The company Notion was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by two young entrepreneurs, a cognitive scientist with an interest in user-friendly design and a software engineer, out of frustration with other note-taking and productivity software, which they considered too rigid. They received help from several venture capitalists who invested a total of 350 million dollars in the company. Notion currently has 100 million users, of which 4 million are paying. It is one of the fastest-growing software companies at the moment.

I regularly meet colleagues, particularly those working in cross-border teams, who are already using Notion. I myself have 'built' my stories for De Groene Amsterdammer in Notion over the past two years. This has allowed me to explore the various possibilities. I can show practical examples and have created a template for a research database, including checklists and prompts, which I can share with you.

Notion is a gift for journalists: inexpensive, extraordinarily powerful, and enjoyable to work with.

Request for customised training.

‍