Mobile app Discors is a news aggregator that licenses content from premium, often subscription-based, news organizations. The app pairs news stories with analysis, commentary and insights.

It’s never been easier to just hop on a live video stream and broadcast to the world from wherever you are. So now that anyone with a smartphone can do this, the question is which tool makes the most sense to use? In this episode, we compare three different live-streaming services: Facebook Live, Kanvas for Tumblr and Periscope. We also take a look at what YouTube has in development for going live.

Shannon McGregor and the team at the Engaging News Project believe analytics data can do a lot more than just help newsrooms attract audience. Through academic research out of the University of Texas at Austin, the Engaging News Project seeks to find ways newsrooms can use data to better understand what people really need.

For 20 months, Reported.ly adopted a grassroots approach to telling stories by sourcing from social media to get perspectives from people around the world. But on Aug. 31, Reported.ly was shuttered after its parent company, First Look Media, pulled its funding. We spoke with Reported.ly founder and editor Andy Carvin about what the team learned along the way.

Journalists are routinely using virtual reality and 360-degree video to put viewers in places they wouldn't otherwise be able to visit. But for smaller newsrooms with modest budgets, 360 video can seem out of reach.

Shaheryar Popalzai, a Knight International Journalism Fellow, says building a 360 video toolkit is easier and cheaper than you might think. He offers affordable recommendations for assembling a basic 360 toolkit.

Electome is a new tool from the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab that uses data to help capture and analyze social media conversations around the 2016 presidential election.

The system uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze hundreds of millions of tweets every day. It then sorts them into categories – from issue to candidate to civility of language – to enable journalists to compare and contrast the prevalence of issues over time.

Most news organizations have limited functionality within Snapchat. But as one of the Snapchat Discover partners, CNN can offer multi-part news updates that are available to all Snapchat users. We talked with Ashley Codianni, director of social publishing, about how CNN hopes its effort on the platform will create a constant news habit among young people who don't follow traditional channels. Reporting by Mitchel Summers, Jon Doty and Sarah Sabatke.

Anchor is an iOS app that allows users to interact and engage through audio recordings. These audio conversations can be shared on social media or exported to include in other broadcasts. Reporting by Sarah Sabatke.

Email newsletters are far from new, but recently there’s been a resurgence in their popularity. With this renewed interest come new techniques. We look at five innovative approaches to delivering newsletters, inspired by Clover Letter, BuzzFeed and TheSkimm. Reporting by Whitney Matewe.

This week we look at Spark, a bundle of visual storytelling apps from Adobe that can enable journalists to create webpages, social graphics and animated videos. Reporting by Whitney Matewe.