I’m a big fan of Evernote. It’s a cloud note app which syncs an infinite number of notebooks across every PC and phone I own, and works on Mac, iPhone, Windows and – importantly – Linux. There are better ways of organising research for journalists, but none that I know of which synch so well across everything.
There are two things I’d do to improve it.
The first is nested notebooks. My tree directory is getting a bit stupidly long now, because the only realistic way to keep things organised is to have a notebook for every story you’re writing. It’d be nice to have a notebook for Stuff, for example, broken up into sub-books for laptop reviews, GPS reviews etc. Or an International Development book broken up by country.
You could probably do this with tags, but I’m hopeless at tagging photos or notes properly. My brain hasn’t evolved properly into the new era of fluid data sorting, and needs some sort of library hierarchy to fall back on.
The other thing I’d do is introduce a decent To-Do list, so I don’t have notes spread across Evernote and Remember the Milk, but can keep everything in one place.
The first improvement I can be patient about. Second I’m hoping will be sorted by Egretlist, which I’m busy installing now.
