Poynter Partners With Google News Lab and Society for Professional Journalists to Train Journalists in Digital Storytelling Tools

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Aug. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Poynter Institute will team up with Google News Lab and the Society for Professional Journalists to create training at no cost for journalists in the use of digital tools to tell more powerful stories and inform citizens.

Google, Poynter and SPJ are committed to free and low-cost training as many journalists as possible in the effective use of digital tools in reporting stories. Trainers from around the country will develop workshop opportunities for newsrooms and journalism conferences.

In addition, Google News Labs and Poynter will host regular virtual office hours via Google Hangouts, so journalists can ask for help with the various Google tools. The first Google News Labs office hours will be at 9:00 AM PT Friday Aug. 28.  For more information or questions about the training, click here:  Google Hangouts On Air . These offices hours will give people the opportunity to hear from specialists within Google, get answers to FAQs and get guidance regarding where to find more resources to make their jobs easier.

Poynter's partnership with Google is the institute's first major alliance with a digital technology company.

"We're excited to be working with the Google News Lab as its training partner for a couple of important reasons. First and foremost, this has the potential to help journalists improve their storytelling for readers and viewers," said Poynter President Tim Franklin.

"This also represents a milestone for Poynter. This is the institute's first major partnership with a digital technology company, and it's a symbol of our strategic shift to focus our training efforts on storytelling in the digital age."

This partnership with the Google News Lab is the most recent in a series of other training alliances with major companies Poynter currently has in place.  Those include partnerships with the Gannett Co., Journal Media Group (formerly the E.W. Scripps Newspapers), the McClatchy Co., The Associated Press, National Geographic and Pioneer News Group.

Selecting Poynter as a training partner for this important initiative builds on Poynter's other successful training efforts with Google, which included Google Day at Poynter, as well as other Poynter News University training webinars like Diving Deep Into Google Trends.  

"We've done great work with Poynter in the past, bringing educational opportunities to journalists through one off training sessions," said Nicholas Whitaker, Media Outreach Manager for Google's News Lab. "This partnership will allow us to refine our work and bring those opportunities to an even broader audience, in a long term, sustained effort."

"SPJ has been providing Google training at its Excellence in Journalism conference for years, so it is exciting to build on our relationship with Google in a way that will allow us to reach more journalists across the country with this training," said SPJ National President Dana Neuts. "This program is a continuation of our collective desire to arm journalists with the tools they can use to improve their information gathering and reporting which, in turn, provides more compelling journalism to readers, viewers and listeners."

The partnership will kick off with an in-person workshop this summer at Poynter on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 for a group of ten participants who have been selected to develop workshops on digital tools.

The Google News Lab Trainers will include: Nicholas Whitaker, Media Outreach manager, Google News Lab; Kelly McBride, Poynter's Vice President of Academic Programs; Vanessa Schneider, Google's Geo Media Program Manager; Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Vice President and Senior Scholar and Vidisha Priyanka, Interactive Learning Producer for Poynter.

The training will focus on these Google digital tools, among others:

Google Search / Advanced Search Tools http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/

• Google Trends: http://google.com/trends
• Google Public Data: http://www.google.com/publicdata
• Embeddable maps: http://maps.google.com
• Google My Maps: http://google.com/mymaps
• Google Fusion Tables: http://google.com/fusiontables
• Street View / UGC panoramas: http://www.google.com/maps/about/contribute/photosphere/
• Google Earth Pro: http://earth.google.com
• Google Crisis Map: http://google.org/crisismap
• Google Permissions + Broadcast licenses: http://google.com/permissions  
• Mailing list: http://g.co/GoogleMediaAlerts

About The Poynter Institute:  The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a global leader in journalism education, and a strategy center that stands for uncompromising excellence in journalism, media and 21st century public discourse. Poynter faculty teach seminars and workshops at the Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., and at conferences and organizational sites around the world. Its e-learning division, News University, www.newsu.org, offers the world's largest online journalism curriculum in 7 languages, with more than 400 interactive courses and 325,000 registered users in more than 200 countries. The Institute's website, www.poynter.org, produces 24-hour coverage of news about media, ethics, technology, the business of news and the trends that currently define and redefine journalism news reporting. The world's top journalists and media innovators come to Poynter to learn and teach new generations of reporters, storytellers, media inventors, designers, visual journalists, documentarians and broadcast producers, and to build public awareness about journalism, media, the First Amendment and protected discourse that serves democracy and the public good.

Contact: Kim Tobin
Marketing Communications Strategy Manager
The Poynter Institute
[email protected]
727-553-4707

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SOURCE The Poynter Institute