From Canva to Flourish, discover four free, AI-powered tools that make visual and interactive storytelling easier
Telling a great story today isn’t enough. Journalists need to present their work in ways that grab attention and hold it. This article explores four AI-powered tools that make creating visuals and interactive stories easier and more accessible, especially for small teams and freelancers working with limited resources.
Every journalist has a story they’re proud of , one that took months or even years to build, a story that mattered. But not every great story finds its audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re working as a freelancer or in a newsroom, everyone hopes their stories will reach as many people as possible and have a longer life.Unfortunately, the reality is often different.
For example, you invested three months investigating a story, only to be read by just 1.000 people, most of them fellow journalists. Even worse, the story is forgotten within a few days. This is often the reality in the Balkan media context.
But, some stories live far longer than the news cycle. A good example is the New York Times’ “Snow Fall”. This multimedia story set a new standard for storytelling that’s still influential today. Another is the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigation, which inspired an Oscar-winning film. We can also mention the Guardian’s “NSA Files” that shaped global debates on privacy for years.
What makes these stories last over time isn’t just the strong reporting. It’s how they use visuals and interactive elements to keep people interested and reach more readers over time.
Returning to the Balkans, reaching a wide audience and ensuring a story’s longevity remains a persistent challenge for many journalists and media outlets. This is unless the stories also look good and feel engaging. That means journalists now need to think beyond the text, adding visuals, interactivity, and multimedia elements to help their work stand out and last longer online.
The idea is simple. If you’ve spent a month or even three researching a story, why not invest just a few more hours to give it the visual identity it deserves? At the end it’s worth spending a few extra hours making sure your story looks as strong as it reads.
The good news is that this has become easier than ever. Thanks to AI-powered tools, creating visually attractive stories is now possible even for small media outlets or freelancers who don’t have a designer on their team.
In this article, we explore four easy-to-use tools that can help journalists improve the visual side of their work. These tools can give your stories a better chance to reach, engage, and stay with the audience. It’s also worth mentioning that all three are free to use.
Canva: Fast visual storytelling
For many journalists, especially those working in local or regional media outlets or freelancers, Canva is often the first visual tool they try. It’s a great choice because it’s easy to use, so journalists don’t get discouraged when exploring design for the first time. Canva has also started adding AI features to make design even easier. Its AI tools can help generate images from text descriptions, suggest layouts, and automatically resize designs for different platforms.
With these features, Canva makes it easy for journalists to create eye-catching visuals without needing a designer (not to replace professional designers, but to support teams with limited resources).
What journalists can do in Canva:
- Visual Storytelling: Design infographics, timelines, charts, and maps.
- Social Media Graphics: Create posts, carousels, and quote cards for all platforms.
- Thumbnails & Covers: Make YouTube thumbnails, podcast covers, and headers.
- Mobile Video Enhancements: Add subtitles, animations, and resize for platforms.
- Consistent Branding: Use brand kits and templates for a unified newsroom look.
One great tool for reporters is audiograms, short videos that combine audio clips like interviews with moving sound waves and captions. Journalists can use Canva to create audiograms by adding audio clips with animated sound waves and captions, making interviews or quotes more engaging on social media. Audiograms are perfect for sharing key parts of your story on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok helping you reach more people.
Piktochart: Bringing data to life
Piktochart is a popular choice to create clear and simple visuals from data. It’s easy to use and helps turn numbers into stories that readers can quickly understand.
Piktochart offers a wide range of AI-powered design tools to help users create professional visuals quickly and easily. These include generators for banners, brochures, business plans, social media posts, infographics, presentations, reports, timelines, and even YouTube thumbnails. For journalists, features like the AI infographic maker and social media post generator make it easier to turn data and stories into eye-catching content that works across different platforms.
Here are some practical ways journalists have used Piktochart-style visuals to make complex information easier to understand:
- Visualise election results with simple charts showing vote shares by region
- Show climate change data like temperature changes and extreme weather events in easy graphs
- Illustrate pollution levels over time to highlight environmental issues
- Turn survey data into clear pie charts and bar graphs for public opinion stories
Piktochart works great for stories like election results and political data breakdowns, budgets and spending reports, surveys and public opinion data or health and environment statistics.
Flourish: Tell an interactive story
If you are a journalist who isn’t afraid to experiment and can invest a few hours creating multimedia content, Flourish is a tool worth exploring. It lets you build interactive stories with dynamic charts, maps, and graphics that invite readers to explore the data themselves.
One of Flourish’s standout features is scrollytelling, as readers scroll, visuals shift and change to guide them through the story step by step. This makes complex topics easier to understand and keeps audiences engaged longer.
You can also add videos, animations, and other multimedia elements to enrich your storytelling. Best of all, Flourish offers a free plan, making it accessible for freelancers and small teams wanting to try interactive storytelling without extra costs.
Flourish offers a range of features that help journalists create engaging, interactive stories that go beyond traditional articles:
- Build dynamic charts, maps, and graphics readers can explore
- Use scrollytelling to guide readers step-by-step as they scroll
- Add videos and animations to make stories more engaging
- Free to use, great for freelancers and small teams
One great local example of using Flourish as a storytelling tool is Lidija Pisker’s story from the Culture and Creativity for the Western Balkans project. Instead of a simple text-based article, she created an interactive story that unfolds the secrets of traditional crafts.
Using Flourish, Lidija was able to combine engaging visuals and interactive elements that bring the story to life, making it more compelling and accessible to readers.
Napkin: The AI shortcut to visual storytelling
One of the new AI tools for visualizations journalists can experiment with is Napkin. It helps you quickly turn complex information into clear, visual summaries.
For example, you can analyze a 100-page-long report from the Ministry of Environment using ChatGPT, NotebookLM, or another large language model to extract the most impactful data.
Then, you feed that data into Napkin. In seconds, Napkin offers dozens of design possibilities to visualize your key points, and that’s just the beginning. Once you pick a design, you can customize it further to match your style, adjust colors, and even translate it into your local language. For journalists handling dense reports, Napkin is a powerful way to make stories easier to understand and more engaging.
To test how Napkin works in practice, I used a simple data set from a quick audience poll on AI in newsrooms. The question was: “Can AI Improve Your Newsroom’s Efficiency?” I entered the results-63.6% said “Yes, significantly,” 31.8% answered “Maybe, depends on resources,” and only 4.5% said “No it’s overrated.”
Within seconds, Napkin generated multiple clean and engaging chart designs. I picked one, adjusted the colors to match my style, and added a short title. The result was a professional-looking visual that was ready to share,all in under five minutes.
Strong reporting alone isn’t enough anymore. By using visual and interactive tools like Canva, Piktochart, Napkin and Flourish, journalists can make their stories stand out, reach wider audiences, and remain relevant longer, all without extra expenses.
