Google launches News Lab, an online resource for enabling data-driven journalism

There’s a new resource to help journalists and media entrepreneurs discover, tell and proliferate stories in the digital age

• Google News Lab: a one-stop resource for learning to use Google's tools for journalism in the data-driven age. | Image source: Google

From real-time news feeds to social media walls and live streaming video to looping clips, there exists a huge proliferation of tools that generate data and information today. From end users to media professionals, people are using these tools in their daily lives to generate content and tell their stories more ubiquitously than ever.

In an effort to help organize all of this real-time information, Google has launched an online initiative called the Google News Lab, which aims to be a one-stop resource for Web journalists and media entrepreneurs to help them locate trends and cover stories more effectively.

The resource contains information on using the various tools that are part of Google’s extensive portfolio--from the newly revamped Google Trends, Google Consumer Surveys, Alerts, and Public Data Explorer to the regulars comprising Google Search, Maps, YouTube et al. Users can access numerous lessons on using these tools with illustrative examples on how they can be used across the entire digital journalism pipeline comprising researching, reporting, distributing and optimizing news stories.

This resource appears to play into Google’s overarching aim of enabling users to access and interpret various kinds of digital data to find and tell stories today that would otherwise not have been possible earlier. In a sense, interpreting big data and applying it to the newsroom.

As part of News Labs, Google has partnered with a slew of companies including Witness Media Lab, Matter, the European Journalism Center, the Center for Investigative Reporting and more. These partnerships bring focus to their thrust on citizen reporting, where virtually any user can tap into mobile technology for creating user-generated news.

They will also be producing a series of events called TrechRaking, which brings  together key players from the journalism, technology and design sectors to share real-world use cases in this new wave of data-driven journalism.