Despite the tremendous growth in so called citizen journalism in recent years, it’s hard to dispute the continued importance of good quality journalism to the world, not least in ensuring that misinformation does not propagate.
With this in mind, Google have recently announced the launch of News Lab, which is a new venture that aims to put all of the tools of Google at the hands of journalists to help them create quality work.
What is News Lab?
The facility has three core aims:
- To ensure journalists are aware of and have access to the Google suite of tools, including YouTube, Google News and Google Analytics
- To ensure journalists have access to useful data from Google
- To provide journalists with programs to explore the opportunities that exist in the media world
Suffice to say, many of the tools in the Google suite should be well known to journalists. It could also be argued that there is little real need for more ‘enterprise’ tools such as Google News and Analytics unless the journalists have their own web properties.
Indeed, the initial tutorials on the site are around these kind of things, together with setting up and running a YouTube channel.
Whilst that’s interesting, I suspect the meat of this offering will come via the data that Google are making available.
For instance, Google Trends has been updated to provide journalists with richer data around which they can base their stories. Interesting data picked up by the service is being curated via a dedicated Twitter channel.
The future of media
The lab are also developing various programs aimed at understanding the future of news and information. For instance, they are supporting media based startups through partnerships with the Matter media accelerator and the Hacks/Hackers community group for software developers and journalists.
With citizen reporting continuing to blossom, Google are looking to further support this area via three distinct projects:
These all utilize YouTube and other open platforms to provide an easy and accessible way to publish first hand news content from around the world.
Google have had a prickly relationship with the news media over the years, and it isn’t clear that this latest venture will revolutionize the news industry, but it’s certainly one to keep an eye on and see how it evolves over the coming years.
