Google India offers new courses for scribes to help newsrooms continue innovating

Data journalism, reverse visual search and mobile journalism are among the new courses that the Google News Initiative announced on Monday.

The new courses are designed to help newsrooms continue innovating, Google India said.

The Google News Initiative India Training Network was launched in 2018 and along with the Google News Lab, this network has helped train over 35,000 journalists across India to date to efficiently use free digital tools and resources that help elevate quality journalism.

These courses have imparted skills such as the effective use of Google search operators; using reporting-friendly tools such as site-archiving and audio transcription, using web monitoring via Trends and Alerts, and tips on how to verify content through reverse visual searches and geolocating images.

The new courses announced on Monday will help scribes learn how to find and visualise data easily without having any special graphic designing or coding skills.

The new course will also help equip journalists with the basic tools needed to work more efficiently.

There will also be a session that will help journalists identify the full range of misinformation, disinformation and outright falsehoods that are so often circulated, Irene Jay Liu, News Lab Lead, APAC, Google, wrote in a blog post.

"The importance of quality journalism can never be overstated -- especially in these times of healing and recovery for people as well as businesses - where readers continue to depend on the vital role that newsrooms across the country play in delivering authoritative, timely, and trusted news," Liu said.

Registrations for the course have started.