Creating a visual or graphic to accompany your story, or in some cases to do the storytelling, typically is a one-time shot. What if you had a news app that could be used repeatedly to produce visuals for different stories? 

That’s what Autotune is offering to anyone at no cost.  Developed by Vox Media to address the problem of reusability of its own work, the company said, “The goal of Autotune is to shorten the ap between building a one-off website or interactive graphic and building a reusable tool for generating many things.” 

The Editorial Products team at Vox Media has put together a centralized management system for charts, graphics and other tools. As the company puts it, “Autotune automates the steps a news developer would typically take to download a project, load new data into that project, and build and deploy that project to a public place.

The result, according to the company, is "a very well defined path to take a project from a simple one-off production to a reusable project blueprint." 

In introducing Autotune, Vox Media includes considerable detail about the software before getting to the nuts and bolts of how editors and reporters can use the Autotune. There’s a tutorial on how to get Autotune running on your computer. You’ll also find instructions on how to implement it in the newsroom.