Next year, nearly 500 local elections for Senate and House seats are taking place across the United States. As part of our mission to help journalists report on the stories that matter, we  worked with ProPublica to build the Election Databot: a tool that provides data about all of those elections, from campaign spending to Google Search Trends for candidates.

The new version of the Databot includes key data for national and local reporters writing about the hundreds of local races taking place across America, including:

• Google Search Trends for each candidate and incumbent with real-time search data
  
• YouTube videos from candidates and incumbents
  
• Candidate spending data from the FEC
  
• Voting records and Congressional data
  
• Articles from Google News, including local news sources about each candidate
  
• Press statements from each incumbent candidate
  
• Cook report race ratings for each election
  
• Deleted Tweets from Politwoops

You can explore either national or local data, and can set up notifications for a particular race. 2018 will be a big year for politics, and the Databot can help journalists report on election stories in new and exciting ways.

Data Journalism—the skill of combining reporting with data—is becoming an increasingly important part of every journalist’s toolkit. That’s not just anecdotal: a recent study commissioned by the Google News Lab found that half of all news outlets have at least one dedicated data journalist.

So, for the seventh consecutive year, we’re proud to support the 2018 Data Journalism Awards.

These are the only global awards recognizing work that brings together data, visualization and storytelling. It’s a part of our commitment to supporting innovative journalism around the world.

Data journalists, editors and publishers are encouraged to submit their work for consideration using this form by March 29, 2018. But don’t get too comfortable with that deadline, early applications are encouraged.

Last year there were 573 entries from 51 countries across five continents. Past winners of the $1,801 prizes include include BuzzFeed, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, ProPublica, and La Nación, as well as smaller organizations such as Rutas Del Conflicto, Civio Foundation and Convoca. And if you’re wondering why the prize is $1,801, It’s because William Playfair invented the pie chart in 1801.

Aimed at newsrooms and journalists in organizations of all sizes, the 2018 awards will recognize the best work in key categories, including:

• Data visualization of the year
  
• Investigation of the year
  
• News data app of the year
  
• Data journalism website of the year
  
• Best use of data in a breaking news story, within first 36 hours
  
• Innovation in data journalism
  
• Open data award
  
• Small newsrooms (one or more winners)
  
• Student and young data journalist of the year
  
• Best individual and team portfolio

The competition is organized by the Global Editors Network: a cross-platform community of editors-in-chief and media professionals committed to high-quality journalism, with the support of Google and the Knight Foundation.

The Data Journalism Awards offer another way to foster innovation by partnering with the news industry, in addition to our efforts with the Digital News Initiative. A jury of peers from the publishing community will decide on the winners.

Winners will be announced in May 2018 at a ceremony in Lisbon. Good luck!

Google Trends can be window into the world, giving us a peek into what people are searching for—whether it’s elections, music, sports or games. Now you can see the world in realtime through more lenses: News, Shopping, Images and YouTube. We’re opening up more data to show what people in the world are looking for, as they’re looking for it—whether it’s just out of curiosity, to write a story or something else.

And it’s really easy to do: say you’re curious about search interest in Taylor Swift following the recent release of her latest album. You now have the option to explore that data in different ways, like finding the related videos that people are searching for on YouTube.

How it works

As you can see, the topic of “American singer-songwriter” comes up—that’s the one you want to click on, otherwise it will only look for searches for the words “Taylor” and “Swift.”

That takes you to a page like this, which shows search interest in Taylor, worldwide. You can then change the time range to within the last seven days and the geography to the United States. That’s now showing search interest in the U.S. for the past week, and looks like this.

But that’s just web search. Click on the button on the right and more options appear:

We search in different ways on different platforms. So, when you look at the search on YouTube, you can see the spike in searches for video of Taylor’s performance on “The Tonight Show.”

But switch it to Google Images and you can see a 700 percent spike in searches for “Saturday Night Live,” after her performance on the show.

You can also use the tool to see where interest is strongest (in this case, Utah and Nebraska are top states for YouTube searches):

Explore the Google Trends site and see more of how the world searches for Taylor, her music or anything that you’re interested in. And you can read more about how Trends data works here.

Nine months ago, 37 newsrooms worked together to combat misinformation in the run-up to the French Presidential election. Organized by First Draft, and supported by the Google News Lab, CrossCheck launched a virtual newsroom, where fact-checkers collaborated to verify disputed online content and share fact-checked information back to the public.

The initiative was a part of the News Lab’s broader effort to help journalists curb the spread of misinformation during important cultural and political moments. With a recent study finding that nearly 25% of all news stories about the French Presidential election shared on social media were fake, it was important for French newsrooms to work closely together to combat misinformation in a timely fashion. 

  A few themes emerged from the report:

• Accuracy in reporting rises above competition. While news organizations operate in a highly competitive landscape, there was broad agreement that “debunking work should not be competitive” and should be “considered a public service." That spirit was echoed by the willingness of 100 journalists to work together and share information for ten weeks leading up to Election Day. Many of the journalists talked about the sense of pride they felt doing this work together. As one journalist put it, “debunking fake news is not a scoop.”    
• The initiative helped spread best practices around verification for journalists. Journalists interviewed for the report discussed the value of the news skills the picked up around fact-checking, image verification, and video authentication—and the lasting impact that would have on their work. One journalist noted, “I strengthened my reflexes, I progressed in my profession, in fact-checking, and gained efficiency and speed working with user generated content.” 
  
• Efforts to ensure accuracy in reporting are important for news consumers. The project resonated with many news consumers who saw the effort as independent, impartial and credible (reinforced by the number of news organizations that participated).  By the end of the election, the CrossCheck blog hit nearly 600,000 page views, had roughly 5K followers on Twitter 180K followers on Facebook (where its videos amassed 1.2M views). As one news reader noted, ““many people around me were convinced that a particular piece of misinformation was true before I demonstrated the opposite to them,” said one person. “This changed how they voted.”
  

You can learn more about the News Lab’s efforts to work with the news industry to increase trust and fight misinformation here.