Google introduces News Lab, a resource for journalists
Google is launching a slate of tools to help reporters sort through and understand the Internet’s data.
In addition to its mission of “organizing the world’s information,†Google is now trying to help newsrooms around the world make sense of that information.
On Monday, the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant announced News Lab, an initiative that offers tools, data sets and media partnerships to help reporters sort through the vast amount of online data.
News Lab features interactive tutorials on how to get the most out of tools like Maps, YouTube and Fusion Tables, as well as an update to the Google Trends platform, which lets journalists track trends in Google searches.
As part of the initiative, the company announced partnerships with media start-ups such as Matter and Hacks/Hackers, which involves financial support from Google and mentorship from Google engineers to help them build their businesses. The company also announced three projects that will support citizen reporting, each making use of platforms like YouTube, Medium and the Witness Media Lab.
Google has been criticized in the past by news publishers for scraping news from their sites and using it for free.
Twitter: @traceylien
