ideas zone: Google News Lab Digital Journalism Training

Trainer: Barbara D’Amico | Teaching Fellow, Google News Lab – Italy

iMEdD in collaboration with the Google News Lab, organizes the series of four, two-hour-long sessions targeting to familiarize journalists with essential digital tools that cover different aspects of research, verification, data processing and visualization and to provide a foundation for online collaboration.

The series, consisting of 4 two-hour long sessions taking place every Tuesday of March, is addressed to experienced professionals, young journalists as well as journalism school seniors, is conducted in English & is free of charge.

  • Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021, 5-7 PM: Essential Tools and Remote Collaboration

This session will equip you with practical research tips with examples. We will highlight the tools to help you verify social media content across Google and refine search at its best. We will point to digital journalism tools that can help you research, edit and publish your ideas, including a look at how Google Trends can complement your storytelling. You will have the chance to dive into a range of tools with examples along the way.

  • Tuesday, March 9th, 2021, 5-7 PM: Investigation and Verification

For investigative journalists: take a deeper look at techniques to help verify information, including how to analyze photos, and how to examine videos frame by frame. Learn how to research and visualize stories with data tools. Understand how to protect your own data with a range of digital safety and security tips. Tools we are going to use/explore: Earth, Pinpoint, Fact Check Explorer, Project Shield 

  • Tuesday, March 16th, 2021, 5-7 PM: Data Journalism and Visualization

This session is a deeper dive with hands-on experiments for journalists who want to learn how to discover stories in data and visualize them — no coding necessary. Basic introduction to scraping data with Google Sheets. Use Google Trends to find stories in the most-often searched terms and explore Data GIF Maker for quick and clean interactives. Explore Flourish – a tool that provides ready-made data visualization templates for your stories. Among the tools we are going to dig into:  Trends, Maps, Public Data Explorer, Data GIF Maker, Flourish, Sheets 

  • Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021, 5-7 PM: Storytelling with maps

From a breaking news situation to a feature length article – learn how Google Maps and Earth images can complement your social media posts or add a visual element to your print and online articles. We will dive into storytelling with maps, and showcase examples with StreetView images. We are going to learn how to build customized 3d maps for news outlets. Among the tools we are going to sue: Google Earth Web, and Google My Maps, Flourish Projection Maps and many others.

The News Lab is a team within the Google News Initiative whose mission is to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to drive innovation in news. Offering partnerships and training in over 50 countries, the News Lab brings the best of Google technology to tackle important challenges in journalism today.

For more info g.co/newslab