Google has announced a new suite of tools – Journalist Studio - to help news reporters and journalists to work more efficiently using technology aids. The Journalist Studio is part of the company’s Google News Initiative to work with the news industry in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.
The company has unveiled two new tools today as part of the suite.
Pinpoint
Pinpoint helps reporters go through hundreds of thousands of documents quickly by automatically identifying and organizing the most frequently mentioned people, organizations, and locations.
The tool helps reporters use Google Search and Knowledge Graph, optical character recognition (OCR), and speech-to-text technologies to search through scanned PDFs, images, handwritten notes, e-mails, and audio files. It allows journalists to upload and analyze documents in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Pinpoint was used by USA Today for its investigative report on 40,600 COVID-19-related deaths tied to nursing homes as well as by the Washington Post for a piece about the opioid crisis. Pinpoint is available, and reporters can sign up to request access (requires a Gmail email address).
The Common Knowledge Project
Launching as a beta, The Common Knowledge Project allows journalists to explore, visualize, and share data about several issues. It is built by Polygraph, an award-winning visual journalism team supported by the Google News Initiative.
It helps reporters create their own interactive charts from thousands of data points in minutes as well as embed them in stories or share them on social media. The data comes from Data Commons – currently, it includes U.S. data on issues like demographics, economy, housing, education, and crime.
Source: Google
