Digital Identities for journalists powered by Google News Lab goes global in 2017
After a successful pilot in Sweden, the Digital Identities programme for journalists is going global. With support from the Google News Lab we will run workshops in Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands and India this year. These sessions offer journalists a choice of models to share their process and values online to build trust with readers. Click here to book a place.
Participants will receive help to design and run an experiment that can extend the life cycle of their stories online. As part of the session, Google News Lab will provide a digital tools workshop to help journalists strengthen their online newsgathering and reporting.
“We’re excited to support Digital Identities and bring their unique form of training and innovation to new audiences in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and India. Journalists will walk away with new skills and equipped to experiment in an area of their choice — it’ll be fascinating to see these develop over the next few months.”
Matt Cooke, Google News Lab.
These sessions are open to editorial teams, product owners, community managers and hyperlocal publishers. No prior experience of social media or digital storytelling is necessary. Each workshop also includes inspirational lightning talks from international journalists who are using social media and online tools to engage readers.
In Sweden, we had participants from news, television, and radio broadcast organisations. Some ran experiments to co-create powerful stories with their readers. The most striking example is the story: How I fled Isis and celebrated Christmas with a Swedish circus written for The Local (Voices). The Local is an English-language news network that covers 9 European countries with 5 million readers a month. The team used a game-based narrative to share the editorial process for this story with their readers.
“The Google News Lab Digital Identities Workshop helped me think differently about communication and community in the digital world. I found the concept of digital ecosystem quite useful for understanding the interplay between publisher and audience.”
David Landes, Head of Commercial Content, The Local, Sweden
“It was useful to look at new ways to produce news stories using social media during the workshop… the follow-up support helped us understand how we can use storytelling techniques to maintain reader interest and evoke empathy.”
Hanna Österberg, Social Media Editor, Svenska Dagbladet
This free workshop is open to editorial teams, product owners, community managers and hyperlocal publishers. No prior experience of social media or digital storytelling is necessary. Click here to to learn more and to book a place.
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About Digital Identities: After 7 years and workshops in 10 countries, the Digital Identities framework has seen success working with media, culture and government. The framework has been developed by Abhay Adhikari (PhD), who works globally with private and public sector organisations to develop digital engagement and innovation projects. Abhay also leads the Urban Sustainable Development Lab, which has been named as one of UK’s 50 radical-thinking projects by the Observer newspaper.
About Google News Lab: Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We created the News Lab to support the creation and distribution of the information that keeps us all informed about what’s happening in our world today — quality journalism. Today’s news organisations and media entrepreneurs are inventing new ways to discover, create and distribute news content — and we’re here to provide tools, data and programmes designed to help. You can learn more at g.co/newslabX
