Speaker 1: Hi everyone, welcome to another Journalist Toolbox training. I'm Mike Riley, the founder and editor of the Journalist Toolbox, and today we're going to play with an app called Headliner.app. This is a desktop publishing tool that allows you to create audiograms, where you can take an interview or maybe a short podcast and turn it into a visual element that you can take and use in YouTube or attach to a social media channel and do some really cool stuff with it. So the website we're going to go to is headliner.app. It's right here, make.headliner.app and create. You can set up a free account if you want to hit pause here and kind of follow along with it. We do keep similar resources to this on the Journalist Toolbox podcast page, journalisttoolbox.org. The podcast page is right out on the front page, usually somewhere, and you can just go in and open it up and it has all kinds of tools for creating podcasts. Also, it has links to really good journalism podcasts, podcasts about the media and things like that. So a lot of really great resources in here if you want to learn to use audio in your reporting. So this is headliner.app and again, if headliner, if you want to, you know, pause right now and set up a free account at headliner.app, you can. You can start with a free account and then decide if you want to upgrade. I'm going to talk about some of their paid packages here in a minute. But headliner, as you launch the page, it has the different tools up here. You can do a full episode of your podcast and post it. You can also create a video transcript of it. It does a pretty good job of transcribing the audio and you can save that transcription. There are many other tools for it. I've got some other training videos up here on transcription, or you can just go straight into the editor and kind of decide what you want to do. You import the audio and then decide what template you want to use. We're going to create a little audiogram. So we're going to use the audiogram wizard. They do have some examples of different audiograms here. You know, you can do a quote or import an image or, you know, different styles to your audiogram layout. And I've got some audio. It's about 28, 29 seconds of former President Obama talking about gun control. It was during a visit he made here in Chicago, right after Hadiyah Pendleton's death years ago. And he talked about gun control and what we need to do to kind of fix things in a city like Chicago that has a lot of homicides. It asks you here, a very short clip, just 30 seconds, which is good, you know, for a social media audio clip that you just want to take and share. You know, because Twitter and many social channels do limit you on length that you could do with an audiogram. You can drag and drop a WAV file, m4a or mp3 file. I've got an mp3 here that I can just go out and you can drag them in or you can upload it through this little interface here. And there's my audio clip. It's Obama quote. There's the full audio there of the entire speech. And it takes, you know, a little bit, it gives you 10 minutes or less of audio, or you can transfer over to full episode where you're doing a longer podcast, but you know, for shorter clips like this, and this one's just a few seconds. And it imports the waveform here. You can play it if you want to, or if you want to do an audio transcription of it, I can just hit this button right here and start to transcribe the audio. I'm not going to do that because I'm going to instead create a audiogram. So I'm going to hit the next button here. It's going to ask me to choose an aspect ratio. And it tells you down here what it's best for, you know, the horizontal is good for YouTube and for websites. The square works on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, all three. Instagram stories works well with portrait or TikTok. We're going to go square because I'm going to create a little Twitter template. So you just select it, hit next. And then it gives you all kinds of different choices here of what you can add to it. And this was a previous one that I've done here. So I'm going to select waveform and it defaults to a specific waveform, but you can choose others. You can do, you know, the little boom here and you can change the size of it, things like that. So if you want it to kind of wobble in and out, you can do that. I'm going to choose the waveform and I'm going to lower it down right about here. Drag it across, you know, you can just kind of experiment. Once you start playing with it, you can go back and always change these things. There's different settings in here. You can change the color of the waveform and so on. You know, you can do all kinds of different things you want with it. And I just hit the X once I'm done with it and it saves it automatically, which is really nice. It gives you a progress bar choice. You can add a little progress bar to the bottom of the screen. And this one's already kind of sitting down here. I can do it as the little player here, but I'll do it this one as the bar. And if I wanted to go back and drop my waveform so it sits right on top of it, I can do so just by clicking back on waveform and moving it back down. It's very WYSIWYG, very easy interface to work in. And the auto saving is just wonderful. I'm going to bring in an image with this. I can change, you know, you've got a background color here that's turned on right now, but I'm going to bring in an image instead. And I'm going to upload a photo. It's just a portrait shot of Obama. I believe he was a U.S. Senator. So let me find it here. There it is, Obama mug shot. And it imports it. It tells you to double click the image to toggle around between, you know, going full size or making it fit the canvas. I'm going to double click on it here and make it fit the canvas so it's got its whole shot in here. Notice I moved the waveform and all this down here so it's not touching his face. And I can go up here to text. And it does limit you somewhat on editing here. But we'll go in here and see if we can, you know, take down the font size maybe a little bit and see if that'll help. 36. We'll take it up just a tad here to 48. You can go across the top, see if I can get it to wrap. You also could, you know, bold face, italicize, underscore. You can change the shadow on it, you know, if you want to use a different shadow color. It does give a little blur with it as well. You know, you can really adjust all these, you know, center it, you know, flush left, flush right, kind of depending on your photo here. And he's kind of a little bit off to the right. So I'm going to save it that way. And it does layer it right across the top. Now that we have the basic layout done, I'm going to title it. You can do that right down here. Audiogram. And I'll just hit create. It gives you the option to go into their advanced editor. You can add transitions and layer tracks in. You can add a watermark in, you know, if you want to put your news organization's watermark on there. I'm just going to export this now as is. I'm not going to add a watermark or anything. Now it does take a few minutes. It kind of walks you through how it's creating it. You can kind of sit and watch that. In this case, I'm going to kind of show you some of the pricing, tell things, move along. It does email you the minute the audio clip is done. And then you can go in and open it up and share it straight to social channels or download it, which is really nice. And I'll show you that in just a minute once it finishes uploading. Pricing, the free version, which I'm showing you here, gets five free videos per month. You can watermark them, 10 minutes of transcription, which isn't a lot. So if you're going to use this a little more for transcription, you probably want to go to one of the paid models. And it does export in 1080p video, which is nice. You can share directly to your social networks. All of this carries over to the other two plans. The $8 per month is the one that I'm probably going to upgrade to next semester with my students. You have unlimited transcription, and transcription works quite well with this. Very accurate, I've found. You can customize your watermarks. It gives you more videos, and you can save your templates, which is really nice if you're doing mass productions of this. The $20 per month is really kind of the Ferrari of the pricing models. It allows you to do pretty much anything you want. It does have a gallery up here. You can see other templates and how other people have used Headliner, which is a great way to do it. So we'll see here, it says, oh, you're going to check your inbox here. So you can go over to your email, whatever you use to set it up with. And it'll deliver an email that looks a lot like this. It'll tell you, hey, it's ready. And there it is. Go to the video. And it should open up back into the interface that you're logged into. Make sure you don't log out before you get the email. Do be patient with it. Sometimes it takes a little longer. This is a pretty short option, but it's a good option. And then it shows your audio clip in here. You can't do a lot of editing with the audio. It shows the progress bar and the waveform. So there you go. Now you've got a nice little audiogram and some visuals with it. You've got a link to it. You can share it straight to these social channels by logging in. It does give you a hot link down here to it. I'm going to download it right here to my desktop, or I should say to my hard drive. It saves it as an MP4. And then I can take this and I can just attach it to a tweet. And you can just upload it as multimedia. And there you go. There it is. Now you've got an audio clip embedded in there. Send it out. People can play it. It's a good way to share your stories. If you've got a good interview, cut out a little audiogram like this. It doesn't take long to put it together. Also, if you're doing a full podcast and you want to move to YouTube, YouTube's steering a lot of traffic to podcasts right now. I know Apple steers a lot of traffic to them and SoundCloud and others. But a lot of people are finding podcasts now on YouTube and doing it as a video, an audiogram podcast will steer a lot of traffic to your podcast. Again, remember journalishtoolbox.org. That is our podcast page. You can find this tool and many others up here as well to edit audio. Descript has a great audio editor. AudioTrimmer.com if you need a quick one in the browser to edit. There are many other tools up here as well. Public records, data journals and fact checking resources, transcription tools. We've got some up there right now. So do take advantage of this free site hosted by the Society of Professional Journalists at SPGA.org or you can go to it directly at journalishtoolbox.org. Thank you much. We'll talk to you later.