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You might be a great reporter. Or a tremendous writer. But to pull off an ambitious piece of investigative reporting, there is another super helpful skill: you need to be an information hacker. No matter what your beat, or where you do your work, there are tools and tactics that allow us to compile and analyze massive amounts of information and use it to create showstopping journalism. Some of them are simple things, like how to best organize your files. Other tools are more high tech, like software that automatically transcribes interviews or a web application that can grab documents, make them word searchable and post them online via a link so you can show off "smoking gun" excerpts of your best evidence. There are dozens of different tools--information databases, software applications, and hardware devices--that can make you a more impactful journalist. We showcase a bunch of these tools and tactics and explain how you can make them part of your own routine. You enter the field at a disadvantage if you don't have them in your pocket.

The Demo Track is sponsored by Knight Foundation.