Tipsheet: Let's get organized
This is a companion piece to the IRE 2024 session, "Tools for FOIA and large project organization." You can access the presentation here.
Madison's Tipsheet
Madison's Tutorials
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  • Madison’s HQ for her fact-checking and FOIA automation tutorials + the everything listed below
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  • Quick overviews on some of the tools you can use in your reporting organization
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  • A step-by-step guide to setting up and using Madison’s tutorial and template. Warning, there are a lot of Taylor Swift GIFS.
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  • Another step-by-step guide featuring even more Swiftie gifs showing you how to set up a FOIA organization system that uses automation to store and organize your requests
Other resources Madison recommends
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  • Awesome newsletter to showcase lots of different tech tools with an eye to how journalists can use them
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  • Very similar to SPJ’s Journalist’s Toolbox (which Reilley also founded/edited up until 2023), but a focus on AI tools.
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  • Huge lists of resources broken down by topic and/or reporting needs
  • Tip: Use the “Browse Topics” dropdown on the right-hand side to explore lists
  • Note: I’m pretty sure this is no longer updated (last update in May 2023)

Michael's Tipsheet
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Github repo for making periodic FOIA requests through MuckRock
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Automatically generate public records requests and track progress
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Suite of tools to help journalists file and manage records requests in bulk, explore repositories of hundreds of thousands of pages of public records and access document tools through DocumentCloud and more.