Notion for Journalists

Notion is ideal software for organizing your investigations. Simple, versatile, and affordable. You don’t need to worry about security either.

Notion is often used by teams of journalists to collaborate on investigations. In this training, you'll learn about different ways to connect ideas, sources, and stories in Notion and analyze them with AI.

The software program Notion is an ^{enhanced note-taking app}. It was developed out of frustration with other note-taking and productivity software, which Notion's creators considered too rigid. Notion competes with Apple’s Notes and Microsoft’s OneNote, and personally, we believe it leaves these competitors far behind. Notion is free, user-friendly, visually pleasing, and versatile. Moreover, you can customize its appearance and functions in many ways to suit your specific needs.

The word ‘Notion’ translates as ‘idea’ or ‘concept’. In terms of appearance, Notion resembles a ^{spreadsheet filled with text pages}. Notion combines the best of both worlds: you can create and save documents in it, as in Pages and Word, and you can sort, group, and filter the stored information, as in Excel and Google Sheets. Notion is a successful marriage between a spreadsheet and a text document.

Throw in a calendar (useful for keeping track of appointments) AND AI (Notion can answer questions, create summaries, and translate), and you have an ^{ideal research database}! Notion has apps for PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. You can also safely collaborate with others within a single project. We use Notion to plan investigative stories, organize research, store documents and contact information, and write the story.

What you’ll learn

• Install Notion on your computer
• Set up a research database
• Apply different views of the database
• Add documents, data, notes, and metadata
• Analyze, translate, and summarize documents with Notion AI
• Search the database with AI
• Create references between documents
• Create a ‘masterfile’ in Notion (using the Story-Based Inquiry method)
• Safely collaborate with colleagues in Notion
• Use third-party apps that work with Notion