Rana Sweis

Journalism World

An app for Journalists: Flyr

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What is it? An app for making animated stories with images, video and text, that can then be shared on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.

Cost: Free, with an upgrade to Pro available for $9.99 (£7.80)/ month

Devices: iOS (Android version in progress)

How is it of use to journalists? News outlets have been using the 'stories' feature on Instagram and Snapchat to give their audiences a behind-the-scenes look at their newsrooms, to cover events, or to take the pulse around an issue. Stories can also sometimes be tweaked and repurposed according to the strengths of the platform – while Snapchat is more recognised for its unfiltered content, Instagram is more well-known for its carefully crafted visuals. Flyr enables journalists to create animated stories for these platforms, either from scratch or by tailoring its selection of pre-made templates.

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Rana Sweis Articles

Journalism World

Unlearning the myth of American innocence

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My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.

When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.

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