Google News Initiative has partnered with DataLeads and Internews to host a series of training sessions titled “PollCheck: Covering India’s Election” for Indian journalists and journalism students for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The sessions will be held in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bangla, Kannada, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi across 30 cities from 26 February to 6 April 2019. They will cover topics like ‘online verification and fact-checking, journalist digital safety and security, YouTube for elections coverage and data visualization for elections.’ Google claims to have trained over 13,000 journalists in 40 cities across India since 2016. It launched the Google News Initiative India Training Network in partnership with BoomLive, Internews, and DataLeads last June, aimed at training journalists on fake news detection and fact checking. Google’s trainers are coached by AltNews, Factchecker.in and others. The network plans to train 10,000 more Indian journalists in 2019. Google’s efforts towards publishers and journalists Note that in 2017, Google said that it would remove sites/publishers from news search results for intentionally masking their country of origin and misleading its users. Google’s algorithm would push down the link in search results depending on the spam reports, and in some cases, lead to complete removal. (More here.) In 2015, Google launched News Labs for journalists which offered tools in the form of tutorials on how to better research, report, distribute and optimize stories for the Internet. The website also had a Data section with data visualizations using Google Trends. The spread of misinformation and…
