How do journalists use technology around the world? A new interactive explorer produced by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and Google News Lab makes it easy to dig into a wealth of new survey data from hundreds of newsrooms worldwide.

Aimed at gauging how well journalists are keeping pace with the tech revolution, the  survey report garnered responses from more than 1,800 newsroom managers and journalists across 130 countries.

The data explorer allows you sift through this unprecedented dataset and surface new findings that shed light on trends in your region and around the world. You can filter by variables such as job position and newsroom type, as well as download the aggregated, anonymized survey data for further analysis.

With the explorer, you can get the answers to general questions around technology usage across the globe and even really specific questions, such as:

• Which tools are reporters in Sub-Saharan Africa using to reach and interact with their audiences?
  
• What types of training are most valued by news editors in Latin America and the Caribbean?
  
• How are newsroom employees in Eurasia/the former USSR securing their data - and how does that compare to those in North America?

ICFJ partnered with Google News Lab, design studio Polygraph and University of Miami’s Knight Chair Alberto Cairo to build the data visualization tool using findings from its State of Technology in Global Newsrooms study, the first-ever global survey of the adoption of technology by the news media.

Check out the data explorer, and see highlights from the survey on Medium.

Data visualization brings more eyes, attention and understanding to complex stories. When it works well, it can make a story crystal-clear. But it takes effort, coding and time—and is sometimes out of reach for all but the biggest newsrooms.

One easy way to make data visualizations is through Flourish, a tool that helps you design and create graphics to embed on a website or export as a SVG file. We’re making Flourish free for journalists, so that it’ll be easier for newsrooms of all sizes and budgets to create their own data visualizations.

We’re also working with design studio Pitch Interactive to make free virtual reality templates for newsrooms in Flourish. Here’s an example: The visual above shows related Google searches for TV shows. Any journalist in a newsroom could use that template, but with different data. For example, the visual below shows searches for U.S. Senators before this year’s midterm elections. (And here’s the visual code on GitHub).

Traditionally, creating the same visual with different data is a tricky job involving developers. Flourish makes that easy—visuals can just be reused as they are, or you can create “stories” to narrate the visual by adding captions and leading the user on a visual journey.

th Flourish, journalists with no coding experience can make high-end interactive graphics  and stories with no tech support—check out these tutorial videos for extra help. Crucially for the data journalism community, Flourish lets newsrooms share templates with each other. Though newsrooms can create some private templates, they can open-source others.

Flourish was soft-launched last year, and since then, the development team worked with designers and data journalists to build the launch version that has just been released. In that time, hundreds of journalists and newsrooms have signed up to use Flourish.

Flourish is just one of a series of tools and resources in our News Lab data journalism toolkit. Other tools include Tilegrams, Data Gif Maker and the Data Journalism Handbook. Look for more this year as we work to make it easier for data journalists to investigate, process, visualize and surface their data across the news industry.

During crises like Hurricane Irma or the Santa Rosa fires, local reporters are often the first on the scene and capture critical coverage. They have in-depth knowledge of the community and its landmarks, providing insights and context to these breaking news events.  

When Hurricane Irma was approaching Miami, the reporting team at the Miami Herald was ready to cover the storm, with journalists posted up at the office, and others positioned in the field. Tim Grieve, Vice President of News at McClatchy, says that was only half the job. "We needed to make sure this life-saving information got in front of readers, too. So we worked to take advantage of all the Google tools available to maximize our reach. The results were incredible—huge bursts of traffic on Play Newsstand and double the usual readership to the Miami Herald site.”

When news is breaking, every minute of your newsroom’s time matters. So we want to make sure you’re set up and ready to go across Google products in the case of a crisis hitting your local community. We’ve created a checklist to help ensure your stories reach the biggest possible audience from Google’s platforms like Search, Google News and Google Play Newsstand—and that you’re aware of the array of tools that can help you report on breaking news.

These suggestions include best practices to implement in advance of a breaking news event, as well as steps to take the moment an event happens—helping your reporters tell the important stories, while making it easy for local and national audiences to find them.

In preparation for a breaking local news event:

• Create an edition in Google Play Newsstand: Google Play Newsstand is a news and magazine reading app with more than 100 million monthly active users. Readers get a customized stream of news that gets better as they use it, and can subscribe to specific publishers and topics of interest. Set up and publish your local editions on Google Play Newsstand to distribute your content to additional readers.
  
• Check your presence in Google News: Google drives more than 10 billion clicks a month to news sites, and Google News is a key piece of this process. Google News data feeds into many of our other tools, such as Google Search and Google Finance. Check that your local sites are included in Google News, and if not, start the application process. Once you’ve done so, learn more about additional Google News features like Editors’ Picks. With Editors’ Picks, your editors can choose what stories they’d like to highlight, and these stories could potentially appear right on the Google News homepage.
  
• Leverage the speed of AMP: More than 50% of people abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load, and mobile pagespeed is even more critical for users during times of crisis. With AMP, your mobile articles are consistently fast, easy-to-read and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms. AMP pages load four times faster—in less than one second when referred from Google Search. Learn the basics of AMP and how to implement AMP on your site. 
  
• Create a presence on YouTube: Each day more than 5 million hours of news content is consumed on YouTube. Establish your presence by creating YouTube channels for your sites. It’s important to upload your top video content right away, and to always include location and descriptive information so your videos can be found easily.
  

When a breaking local news event occurs:

• Maximize your potential audience: If you have a paywall, consider removing it during the breaking news event so those in the community can access the stories and information you’re writing. It's in these crucial times of need that local media can really show their value to the community they report on, giving publishers the opportunity to turn that casual reader into a loyal subscriber after the event.
  
• Build a monetization strategy with an influx of traffic in mind: As you see your traffic increase during the breaking news event, you need a strategy in place to monetize the additional impressions. For example, if you use Doubleclick AdExchange, consider lowering your CPM thresholds to sell more impressions and drive revenue. 
  
• Add Fact Check markup to your debunking articles: During breaking news, there’s a thirst for cold hard facts, yet as events unfold, these facts can take time to emerge. If your team debunks any misinformation being circulated about a breaking news event, we recommend adding the Fact Check markup. Implementing the Fact Check markup will label and highlight your article on Google properties as "fact check," meaning that particular article is fact checking another article or statement. 
  
• Implement the Google News standout tag: Adding the standout tag to your articles gives our algorithm a signal that you’ve published a critical local story, and increases the likelihood the article will appear with the “Featured” label in Google News. We recommend using the standout tag to flag your top local content (up to seven articles per week) for breaking news events. 
  
• Building on your YouTube audience: Upload content quickly on your YouTube channel, provide strong metadata, and create new videos to provide updates on the story. We also recommend that you create a playlist for the event, so people can more easily discover and browse your event-specific videos. 
  
• Use Google Trends Local to understand what your community is looking for: Search trends data can be really useful to give you a view into what your local community is concerned about or focused on—whether readers are looking for sandbag stations or evacuation sites. Check out the Google Trends site for recent search trends data.
  
• Incorporate Google Maps and Earth imagery into your stories to help readers: Create your own emergency maps (like this Google My Map from CAL FIRE), and sign up to receive fresh satellite imagery to show before and after views of an affected area. 

As your team uses these tips, we’d love to hear firsthand feedback and examples, which you can send to [email protected].

In the news and technology communities, the collective sense of urgency about the future of journalism reached new heights this year. Never before has the press been so important—or so under threat. Technology and platforms like the ones Google has built present extraordinary opportunities to strengthen journalism, but they require newsrooms and tech companies working closely together to get it right. That’s why the Google News Lab exists.

1. Combating misinformation in European elections

The spread of misinformation is a growing problem for open societies everywhere. So, helping news organizations confront that challenge—especially during elections—was a key focus for us. We helped the First Draft Coalition pioneer new collaborative reporting models to combat misinformation and verify news stories during the UK, French, and German elections.

2. Helping users identify trustworthy news content on Google

We worked closely with the news industry to better highlight accurate, quality content on our platforms with new product features and partnerships. Along with the Trust Project, we produced eight indicators of trust that newsrooms can add to their content to help users distinguish between quality content and misinformation. We also partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network and The Poynter Institute to increase the number of verified fact checkers across the world.  

3. Empowering underrepresented voices

Bringing underrepresented voices into newsrooms can help uncover important stories that are left out of mainstream news coverage. We supported ASNE’s survey to get a better sense of diversity in newsrooms across the U.S. We also partnered with organizations in the U.S., Brazil, France and Germany to provide journalists from diverse backgrounds with in-depth programs to develop their careers.

4. Strengthening local news

With revenue pressures challenging the creation of quality local news content, we began investing in projects to strengthen local newsrooms across the U.S. We partnered with the Society for Professional Journalists to train more than 9,000 local reporters in digital skills. We’re also supporting Report for America, an initiative that will use a Teach for America model to place a thousand journalists in local newsrooms over the next five years.

5. Researching key challenges in journalism

To better understand key challenges facing the news industry, we produced studies on the state of data journalism in 2017 and how audiences experience VR and what it means for journalists. We also supported the ICFJ’s newsroom study on the usage of technology in newsrooms.

6. Working with newsrooms to experiment on new technology

From drones to virtual reality, we helped news organizations understand and use emerging technologies to shape their reporting and engage audiences in new ways. And we experimented with machine learning, too—we partnered with ProPublica to launch Documenting Hate, a project which uses AI to help build a national database for hate crime and bias incidents.   

7. Building tools for data journalism

Our research into the state of data journalism found that while half of newsrooms have a dedicated data journalist, many lack the tools and resources to be successful. So we built a number of tools—Flourish, Tilegrams, Data Gif Maker, Election Databot— to make data journalism more accessible to newsrooms and journalists across the world.

8. Training journalists across the world in digital skills

With our online training center, advanced online learning partnerships, and in-person trainings, we helped train more than 500,000  journalists across the world in digital tools and skills for storytelling and reporting. To develop the next generation of digital journalists, we offered more than 50 News Lab Fellowships with major news organizations across 12 countries.

9. Helping newsrooms use Google Trends data to support elections coverage

10. Expanding the News Lab to Brazil and Asia

It’s an exciting time for journalism. There are many challenges, but we are eager to work with the news industry to build a more informed world. Tell us where you think we should put our efforts—we’d love to hear feedback and new ideas.

This week we’re looking at the ways the Google News Lab is working with news organizations to build the future of journalism. Yesterday, we learned about how the News Lab works with newsrooms to address industry challenges. Today, we’ll take a look at how it helps the news industry take advantage of new technologies.

From Edward R. Murrow’s legendary radio broadcasts during World War II to smartphones chronicling every beat of the Arab Spring, technology has had a profound impact on how stories are discovered, told, and reach new audiences. With the pace of innovation quickening, it’s essential that news organizations understand and take advantage of today’s emerging technologies. So one of the roles of the Google News Lab is to help newsrooms and journalists learn how to put new technologies to use to shape their reporting.

This past year, our programs, trainings and research gave journalists around the world the opportunity to experiment with three important technologies: data journalism, immersive tools like VR, AR and drones, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Data journalism

Our efforts to help this growing class of journalists focuses on two areas: curating Google data to fuel newsrooms’ work and building tools to make data journalism accessible.

On the curation side, we work with some of the world’s top data visualists to inspire the industry with data visualizations like Inaugurate and a Year in Language. We're particularly focused on ensuring news organizations can benefit from Google Trends data in important moments like elections. For example, we launched a Google Trends election hub for the German elections, highlighting Search interest in top political issues and parties, and worked with renowned data designer Moritz Stefaner to build a unique visualization to showcase the potential of the data to inform election coverage across European newsrooms.

We’re also building tools that can help make data journalism accessible to more newsrooms. We expanded Tilegrams, a tool to create hexagon maps and other cartograms more easily, to support Germany and France in the runup to the elections in both countries. And we partnered with the data visualization design team Kiln to make Flourish, a tool that offers complex visualization templates, freely available to newsrooms and journalists.

Immersive storytelling

Virtual reality
We kicked off the year by commissioning a research study to provide news organizations a better sense of how to use VR in journalism. The study found, for instance, that VR is better suited to convey an emotional impression rather than information. We looked to build on those insights by helping news organizations like Euronews and the South China Morning Post experiment with VR to create stories. And we documented best practices and learnings to share with the broader community.

We also looked to strengthen the ecosystem for VR journalism by growing Journalism 360, a group of news industry experts, practitioners and journalists dedicated to empowering experimentation in VR journalism. In 2017, J360 hosted in-person trainings on using VR in journalism from London to Austin, Hong Kong to Berlin. Alongside the Knight Foundation and the Online News Association, we provided $250,000 in grants for projects to advance the field of immersive storytelling.

Drones
The recent relaxation of regulations by the Federal Aviation Administration around drones made drones more accessible to newsrooms across the U.S., leading to growing interest in drone journalism.  Alongside the Poynter Institute and the National Press Photographers Association, we hosted four drone journalism camps across America where more than 300 journalists and photographers learned about legal, ethical and aeronautical issues of drone journalism. The camps helped inspire the use of drones in local and national news stories. Following the camps, we also hosted a leadership summit, where newsroom leaders convened to discuss key challenges on how to work together to grow this emerging field of journalism.

Artificial intelligence

We also launched an experimental project with ProPublica, Documenting Hate, which uses AI to generate a national database for hate crime and bias incidents. Hate crimes in America have historically been difficult to track since there is very little official data collected at the national level. By using AI, news organizations are able to close some of the gaps in the data and begin building a national database.

Finally, to ensure fairness and inclusivity in the way AI is developed and applied, we partnered with MediaShift on a Diversifying AI hackathon. The event, which convened 45 women from across the U.S., focused on coming up with solutions that help bridge gaps between AI and media.

2018 will no doubt bring more opportunity for journalists to innovate using technology. We’d love to hear from journalists about what technologies we can make more accessible and what kinds of programs or hackathons you’d like to see—let us know.