Contact Card Maker — Build Your Own Journalist vCard (.vcf)
Sources save the person, not the outlet, and a card that imports cleanly into a phone is worth more than a signature nobody copies. The trade-off is that a card pairing your byline with your personal mobile travels further than you intend.
Last reviewed: Next review due:
Contact Card Maker
Build a journalist contact card and download it as a .vcf file or copy as plain text.
Fill in at least a name to generate the card.
How it works
- Eight fields: full name, job title, publication, email, mobile, Twitter/X, LinkedIn and Mastodon. Only the name is required before the output appears — every empty field is simply left out.
- It builds a vCard 3.0 containing FN, a structured N (family;given;additional names), TITLE, ORG, EMAIL, TEL;TYPE=CELL and one URL line per social account, plus a NOTE crediting the tool. Every text value is escaped for backslashes, commas and semicolons per the vCard 3.0 spec. A Twitter handle becomes a twitter.com URL, a bare LinkedIn username becomes a linkedin.com/in URL, a Mastodon handle in the @user@instance form becomes a real https://instance/@user URL, and anything already starting with http is used as typed.
- The download button writes a .vcf file named from your name, lower-cased with spaces replaced by hyphens.
- The copy button puts a plain-text version — name, title, publication, then labelled email, mobile and social lines — on your clipboard, and the same text is shown in an editable-looking read-only box.
- All of it happens in the page; nothing is uploaded.
When to use it
- Sending a source or a contact something they can save to a phone in one tap after a first call.
- Standardising cards across a small team so every reporter hands out the same fields.
- Building the plain-text block for an email signature or a pitch footer.
- Before a conference or a court day where you expect to swap details repeatedly.
What it does not do
- It builds your own card, not a card for a source, a fixer or an emergency contact — despite what the tools feed says. There are no fields for a fixer’s local number, an out-of-hours desk line or a next-of-kin contact, which is what an assignment card needs.
- There is no print output at all, again contrary to the feed description. You get a .vcf download and a clipboard copy.
- A Mastodon address in the @user@instance form now converts correctly to a real profile URL. A bare user@instance typed without the leading @ is left unconverted rather than guessed at, since that shape is just as likely to be an email address pasted into the wrong box — paste the full https://instance/@user address instead if that happens to you.
- Think about the exposure before you fill it in. A card that ties your byline to a personal mobile number is a doxxing risk once it circulates — use a work or VoIP number where you can, and see the doxxing guidance below.
More tools
This is one of the free tools on UK JournoHub. See the full tools index for the rest.