When it comes to free resources for news publishers and content creators, accessible resources and content creation tools are abundant online . Whatever the topic that you need help with, from editorial to design to advertising and sales, you can always find support in a variety of ways. A simple search will bring up blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, articles, newsletters and more — so you can spend more time focusing on producing impactful journalism!
The list below has some great beginner resources and content creation tools to help you manage your tasks, meet your sponsorship revenue goals, design attractive sales collateral and learn new skills.
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Free tools for project and calendar management
Free tools for project and calendar managementAsana
What It Is
Asana is a collaborative project management software. It allows teams to automate workflows across departments, connect work to company-wide goals and centrally manage users and security. It can be used on desktop and mobile.
Why It’s Great
Asana offers a free forever basic option geared towards individuals and small teams (up to 10 users) that is great for all types of task and project management. Asana features different views including lists, boards and calendar. Along with unlimited projects, messages and file storage, you can connect the tool with over 100 free app integrations such as Google Drive, Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Calendly
What It Is
Calendly is a scheduling automation platform that connects to your email calendar to create schedule links and booking pages based on your availability. You can share your Calendly link and the person you want to meet with will be able to view your availability and schedule a time that also works for them.
Why It’s Great
Calendly takes into account your day-to-day schedule and any meetings already scheduled. It’s a great way to eliminate the back-and-forth email game. Setting up Calendly is simple and you can create unlimited one-on-one events. The tool also allows you to integrate video conferencing, send confirmation emails and embed scheduling on your site. The base tier of Calendly is always free, and if you need more features you can move up to the Essentials tier for $10/month.
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Free analytics and data tools
Free analytics and data toolsGoogle Analytics
What It Is
Google Analytics is a comprehensive free tool that gives you an understanding of users across devices and platforms. It’s one of the best ways to access the data your potential sponsors want to see, understand readers’ journey and improve conversion rates.
Why It’s Great
Google Analytics allows you to look at basic audience demographics such as city, age range and gender to see how readers engage with your publication. Through advanced reporting and analysis, you can also see the data for different channels like social and organic. This data also helps sponsors know if your audience is a fit for them. Website views, pages per session and time spent on a page all help sponsors know how many views they can expect from advertising with you.
Read more: Answering all your commonly asked questions about Google Analytics 4
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Free content creation tools for headline writing
Free content creation tools for headline writingHeadline Studio
What It Is
Headline Studio is an AI headline-writing tool for content creators. The tool features AI-powered headline generators that will give you dozens of headline ideas based on the topic, audience and tone selected, , making it a valuable addition to your content creation tools arsenal.
Why It’s Great
Headline Studio will tell you how appealing overall your headline is with a score out of 100). A red score is low, yellow is okay and a headline that is in the green is good. The tool also includes suggestions on what edits to make to increase your score and helps optimize your headlines for SEO.
Read more: A guide to crafting engaging newsletter titles and headlines
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Free tools for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Free tools for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)HubSpot
What It Is
HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that features tools for every aspect of your publishing business such as sales, marketing, customer service and operations.
Why It’s Great
HubSpot has a free option that allows up to five users to track and manage deals in a customizable sales pipeline. You can track details of your business relationships in one place, respond to customer support issues and identify new prospects visiting your site.
HubSpot Academy
A bonus! HubSpot Academy offers a variety of courses in marketing, sales, service and more. You can receive certifications and learn new skills across hundreds of topics for free. If you’re new to sales and you’re struggling to understand the different types of leads and what to do with them, this is a great place to start.
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Graphic content creation tools
Graphic content creation toolsNot everyone can afford access to Adobe Creative Cloud or similar design software. Canva, Adobe Express and CapCut are apps that offer a “forever free” basic option, making them useful content creation tools for those on a budget. If the free versions of Canva, Adobe Express and CapCut don’t have what you need, you can look into their premium subscriptions for more advanced features.
Canva
What It Is
Canva is a free website and app that will let you create images for articles, newsletters, social channels and a thousand more design types. It has over a million professionally-designed templates, an easy drag-and-drop editor and more than three million stock photos and graphics to choose from. While the basic tier is free, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to access premium features.
Read more: Newsletter design best practices for publishers
Why It’s Great
Canva has a large database of fonts, font styles, images and graphics, and templates that make designing eye-catching graphics a breeze. Not a designer? Don’t worry — Canva’s Design School features in-depth tutorials for creating websites, whiteboards, videos, and more content using the tool. It’s one of the best tools for content creators, providing an accessible way to produce high-quality designs and content.
PRO TIP: Micro tier and nonprofit LION members get free access to Canva’s premium features.
Adobe Express
What It Is
Adobe Express is an all-in-one editor for easy content creation that can be used on a desktop or mobile. It can be used to design creative assets for social media, edit photos and videos and make documents for printing.
Why It’s Great
Adobe Express has a free tier for access to basic content creation tools and limited generated AI credits and assets. You can use the AI credits to generate images, templates and text effects from a text prompt. It also comes with over 100,000 static and video templates, more than a million royalty-free Adobe Stock photos and content scheduling for social networks.
CapCut
What It Is
CapCut is a powerful, free content creation tool that serves as an all-in-one video editor and graphic design platform, ideal for publishers and newsrooms. Available on various devices including browsers, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, CapCut combines user-friendly features with advanced capabilities to streamline the content creation process.
Why It’s Great
It offers a range of features, including AI-driven video generation, auto-generated captions, and voice-over capabilities. These capabilities save time and enhance storytelling, making CapCut an invaluable resource for modern journalism.
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Sites to download free fonts
Sites to download free fontsGoogle Fonts
What It Is
Google Fonts is an extensive free font catalog that invites users to explore, sort and test fonts. It also allows you to download entire font families and use them commercially and on any surface.
Why It’s Great
All Google fonts are open source and enhanced for the web, making your website faster. The catalog features a collection of fonts with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems.
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Best sites to get free icons, vectors and illustrations
Best sites to get free icons, vectors and illustrationsFlaticon
What It Is
Flaticon by Freepik is a library with over 16.8 million vector icons and stickers that can be used for a variety of projects.
Why It’s Great
Icons can be downloaded in multiple formats including PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and CSS. They’re also editable, so you can change the color and size to match your project. The icons can also be integrated into Google Workplace documents for free.
The Noun Project
What It Is
The Noun Project is a comprehensive collection of icons and photo library that focuses on inclusivity and diversity.
Why It’s Great
The Noun Project has a free tier that gives users access to black-only icons and standard photos with attribution to the artist. The collection covers a variety of topics, from artificial intelligence to cooking.
Blush
What It Is
Blush is a free illustration repository that allows you to easily create and customize illustrations made by artists from around the world.
Why It’s Great
Blush allows you to combine elements to create an unique illustration and download it in a high-quality PNG. First, you choose a collection from multiple styles and themes. Then you can play around with variations available in the collection until you create the perfect illustration. The last step is to download a PNG or SVG of your creation and use it on your web app, presentation, or any project
unDraw
What It Is
Similar to Blush, unDraw is a free illustration repository where you can browse and download images for projects.
Why It’s Great
It allows you to change the accent color at the website so you don’t need to edit it to match your brand. You can also download the files in PNG and vector (SVG).
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Free stock photo sites
Free stock photo sitesUnsplash
What It Is
Unsplash is a free stock photography website with over six million high-resolution photos and illustrations.
Why It’s Great
Unsplash features a huge library of stock images for free that don’t look like traditional stock images created by a community of 375,000 contributors. No permission is needed, although the photographers appreciate attribution when possible.
Pexels
What It Is
Similar to Unsplash, Pexels is a free stock photo site. The royalty-free images and videos are shared by creators.
Why It’s Great
Pexel features a huge library of stock images and videos that can be downloaded and used for free. No permission is needed, although the photographers appreciate attribution when possible.
Nappy
What It Is
Nappy is a free stock photo site that features high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else .
Why It’s Great
Nappy makes it easy for companies to be purposeful about representation in their designs, presentations and advertisements. All photos posted on Nappy are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero, which means you can download these photos, modify them, share them, distribute them, or use them for whatever you want for free.
Vice’s Gender Spectrum Collection
What It Is
A stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models
Why It’s Great
This collection aims to help the media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities. According to the collection’s guidelines, users should consider using these photos for stories on topics like beauty, work, education, relationships or wellness because including transgender and non-binary people in stories not explicitly about gender identity paints a more accurate depiction of the world we live in today.
Pixabay
What It Is
Pixabay is a free stock photo, video and music site with over five million assets to choose from.
Why It’s Great
Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing royalty free images, videos and music. All content is released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist, even for commercial purposes.
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Color palettes generator tools
Color palettes generator toolsCoolors
What It Is
Coolors is an automatic color palette generator.
Why It’s Great
Coolors is a tool that allows you to generate perfect matching colors in seconds. The free tier allows uses to generate palettes with up to five colors, access over 10,000 ready color schemes and pick colors from an image.
Colormind
What It Is
Similar to Coolors, Colormind is a color scheme generator that creates beautiful color palettes in one click using deep learning. It can also extract a color palette from an uploaded image.
Why It’s Great
Colormind automatically applies your generated color palette to a mock landing page. This allows you to see your color palette in action and decide if your colors would work well on a site!
Venngage
What It Is
Venngage offers tons of templates to help you make infographics, visual reports, mind-maps and more. One of the many tool that Venngage offers is a color palette generator similar to Coolors and Colormind, but with a focus on accessibility.Why It’s Great
The color pairings follow WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 AA, based on a contrast ratio of 4.5:1. The pairings have sufficient contrast for use with normal text, large text and graphics.
In today’s fast-paced media landscape, leveraging essential resources and content creation tools is vital for elevating your journalism. From video editing to graphic design, these tools can enhance your storytelling and engage your audience effectively.
Ready to take your content to the next level? Book a chat with us to explore how our services can support your journey!
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