Google to train 8,000 Indian journalists on fact checking

To guard journalists from falling prey to false news stories, Google India on Tuesday said it will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year.

For this, the Google News Initiative India Training Network will select 200 journalists from cities across India who will hone their skills in verification and training during five-day train-the-trainer boot camps that will be organised for English and six other Indian languages.

This network of certified trainers will then train more journalists at two-day, one-day and half-day workshops organised by the Network.

Training workshops will be conducted in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada in cities across India, Google India said in a statement.

The focus of the training will be fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts from First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in and DataLeads.

“Supporting trusted, authoritative media sources is a top priority for Google, which is why we are proud to collaborate with Internews, DataLeads and BoomLive to support journalists in their fight against misinformation in India,” said Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, Asia-Pacific.

“Our goal is to train more than 200 trainers, who will then train 8,000 journalists in six languages over the next year, making this Google’s largest training network in the world,” Liu added.