well hello everybody welcome to our live stream today we're just going to give it about 30 seconds to a minute for more people to join on make sure you're comfortable you've got a cup of tea this session is going to last about 30 minutes to 45 minutes so you're very welcome to stay with us the whole time and then you can go and grab some lunch afterwards now uh do feel free to write any comments during the session for us on youtube so you know send us what you're thinking about some of your expe
riences if you've got any questions put them in the chat and i'll be able to come on uh on and answer them at the end so maybe about 30 more seconds we'll just wait for a few more people to join and then we'll kick off tell us where you're coming from i know this is uh our first english speaking gni live so i'm sure we'll have people from around the world which is fantastic uh this is an event that's going to be taking place it started last week it's over the next 11 weeks so hopefully you guys
can join us today and schedule more sessions in with us okay let's kick off so welcome everybody uh you are watching the google news lab gni lives so for those of you that don't know the google news lab or haven't worked with us before we're essentially a team that work within the google news initiative and the broader aim of the google news initiative is to work and collaborate with journalists to drive innovation in news and we do that in several different ways but we're very excited to run th
is event for you which is free and available on youtube so that you can watch it over and over again and our aim is to provide you with resources so that you can find verify and tell stories online okay so our aim is to basically reach as many journalists as possible to help you in your work and help you in the investigations that you're working on so today's session is all about covert 19 resources now over the next few weeks we'll be covering a variety of different topics from freelance tools
and tips to investigations we're also going to be talking about visualization mapping analytics and then at the end we're going to have a verification challenge okay so it's super super exciting definitely stay with us for all of the sessions you can schedule them in advance put them in your diaries because we're really excited to be here with you guys so i already mentioned the google news lab is part of the google news initiative and here at the google news initiative our aim is to basically b
uild a stronger future for journalism you know we believe that quality journalism matters we believe that collaboration is the key to both of our success to mutual success there so we work on the premise of these three e's okay so my section here at the google news lab is to elevate and strengthen quality journalism and the other side of the of the work of the google news initiative is to collaborate with journalists to build products to support different programs so we really are trying to tack
le the industry from a variety of different areas and in different directions so that we can help the journalism industry as much as possible and work together so the first thing that i would like to draw your attention to today is the google journalist studio now google journalist studio if you haven't seen it already is essentially a collection of tools and resources that we have online that we think that will help you in your jobs whether you're looking to find information to verify informati
on to debunk those claims online whether you're looking to visualize data and tell stories more effectively and more creatively we have the google journal studio that you can access at any time and it has a range of tools on there that you can click onto and then you can access direct to the tool from our website so do check that out um it's probably unlikely that you've played with all of those tools so if there's some in there that you haven't seen before do please have a look and we offer tra
ining on all of these individual tools ourselves either in newsrooms around the world within the google news lab or on our website so you can head there g dot co forward slash news training where you can have individual tuition that you can download and do in your own time with pdf resources that you can do on any of the individual tools okay and there are teaching fellows amazing amazing journalists around the world that work with newsrooms to provide live training it's online at the moment and
hopefully soon it will be in person so do get in touch if you would like to use any of these tools or if you would like further training from our team okay so for this session today it's all about covert 19 and the resources that are available to you guys as reporters so that you can report on this issue more effectively so whether you're sourcing accurate information or you're looking for reliable fact checks or you're looking at how to submit queries to experts we're going to be running throu
gh some of those tools today that will help you in your work i mean it really has been you know a year like no other i mean this has really shook the year that that term unprecedented that we've had so many times before and you know the onslaught of coronavirus really has forced journalists to step up and and tell this story from a variety of different ways and report on this global story as an ever-changing narrative you know it's completely changing all the time and we have to keep up with tha
t we've seen some amazing data visualizations that have been taking place from data journalism teams and also teams that have been using tools such as flourish to basically tell these amazing animations and help our audiences to understand the story whether that's from how the virus has been spreading to okay the vaccine roll out to how people are more susceptible to it than others so you can see here there's a range of examples i'm going to show you the first one here this is from bbc news they
looked at the range of coronavirus cases and deaths around the world you can see here they've got a projection map that they're using this is done within the tool flourish which you'll find on our website and you've got the economist here they're tracking the pandemic using a bar chart race so we're seeing how this pandemic is evolving how the virus is spreading throughout different countries around the world and there are a range of different visualizations that we've seen journalists do as we
ll sky news here they're using a population pyramid now population pyramids as you can see we can we can look at the difference in the ages between two different countries and see uh what the population is like in these different areas it's just a fun engaging way of showing information you know just like a photo slider is that you can see here on flourish so there are so many different exciting ways that journalists are tackling information and trying to engage audiences in a variety of differe
nt ways of course we've also seen journalists tell the story through visual images to put our human human faces behind the story so you know it really is the story of the year you know we've seen so many amazing articles so many amazing pieces of coverage based around this story now obviously technology and social media plays a huge role in that because it enables us to connect audiences much quicker but i guess the downside of that is that false information can also spread so much quicker now y
ou know through word of mouth is one thing but by sharing a tweet by sharing information a facebook post you know a video that's been uploaded online we can share you know bad information that's not true very very quickly and these falsehoods have really changed over time throughout the pandemic you know we've seen initially how how it spread you know we saw the coronavirus okay where is it coming from and then we looked at okay how can we prevent it then we looked at the cures available we've g
ot the vaccine rollout now so there's so many different pieces of information that can be shared online a lot of them can be untrue and you can see some examples on screen here you know tanks are arriving on the streets and helicopters are spraying disinfectant in the middle of the night there's a giant lasagna in wembley stadium which you would not believe it you kind of have to be there to believe it uh this was a you know a rumor that was was was um spread around by a young man and he you kno
w he posted it online and all of a sudden everybody was believing that there was going to be helicopters dropping pieces of lasagna to people's houses now that might seem like somehow that's not believable but in fact people did believe it so these pieces of information that you might believe some of them might be more likely than others we really need to be careful when we're reporting on them when we're looking at any type of information online now we can see an example here which some of you
might have seen on twitter of uh some misinformation that was spread out you can see here the image on the left this is from a twitter post from a senior chinese government official and now this was posted on march 15 2020 and it claims that italians in rome were singing grazie china to say thank you so much for sending medical supplies and experts to our country during this covered 19 pandemic i'm going to show you that that video of the footage that was posted out so you can have a little list
en for [Music] yourself [Music] [Music] so you can hear that kind of grassy china you know that's clearly like overdub the sound is muffled you know but you know that is a piece of content that's been published online by by an official spokesperson okay so that information can be very quickly spread you can see it had i think it had 247 000 different views you know from that one tweet i'm going to show you the original footage which was dubbed and it was manipulated [Applause] okay so you can he
ar that the original audio from that video is so much clearer those images are different they've been completely manipulated the audio's been manipulated there and when it is posted by someone in a position of authority people obviously will tend to to believe that more so it's really really important with any information that we see online whether that's posted by anybody whether it's well-meaning or not we need to be taking everything with a pinch of salt and really looking into all of the uh
so-called facts that are spread about online okay so you know for a story like coronavirus fact-checking is is not just important for journalists but it's also a matter of public health you know the spread of misinformation disinformation mal information which we're going to get to in a second it's critically it's critical in tackling and slowing the spread of the virus okay so let's just have a think what's the difference between these three things misinformation malinformation and disinformati
on can you guys write in the comments i know there's some of you online that are are here watching now there's about a 30 second delay so i might not see it in real time but do let me know if you know because you know it's not just you know the general public get these things missed up as well it can also be journalists that are working within the industry and that just need to know the difference between these three definitions well the first one that i'm going to talk about is misinformation s
o first of all misinformation obviously it's one of the biggest issues within coronavirus especially the beginning of the pandemic this is information that's false it's completely untrue but the person who is spreading this information about so disseminating it to their friends their family it could be very from a very well-meaning place um they believe it to be true okay so the information is false but the person who's spreading it believes it to be true the next word is disinformation so disin
formation on the other hand is information that is false it's not true but the person who is spreading this information they know it's not true it's a deliberate and it's an intentional lie okay so it's probably spread to cause harm to cause confusion okay so they know why they're spreading it but they also know that that fact is not true not true and thirdly we've got mal information so mal information is genuine true information it's a fact but it has been spread deliberately to cause harm oka
y so that could be private revealing information and that could harm a person or their reputation okay so that has been spread and purely for that reason so you know it's really important that we recognize the difference between these three words that we as journalists are not just recognizing it for ourselves but we're also educating the public in these three types of information that can be spread around because by enabling our audience to understand these methods we're also enabling them and
empowering them to be able to tackle this information straight away okay so when they see it so for them to think before they share so some there's been some um different initiatives that are enabling audiences to understand a little bit more the first one i'm going to show you is a game called go viral now go viral it was initiative from the uk government and we can see here that it's a game that audiences play and they see how posts are manipulated to be more popular with audiences so i'm just
going to jump into the game so you guys can see what it looks like so it's called go viral and an audience member will click to start and you'll see here that there's lots of different types of people that are spreading on social media so the first one said the fear mongerer so i can basically click lots of different options to play this game and see okay i'm gonna pick my own avatar and okay i'll be joel for this this demonstration and you can see some information about social media is being f
ed to me as i'm playing the game okay so i can look at different posts that have been posted out and i can see okay do i want to post this on social media or do i want to skip it okay that one wasn't the key to influence of fame maybe i need to be a bit more eccentric with my post so you can see here why you would respond to certain pieces of information on social media in a certain way and i feel like this helps audiences to see whether a piece of information is necessarily credible and true or
whether it's just being posted to um encourage excitement okay within audiences so that they'll they'll share it so it's really important for audiences to understand that as well and to see you know some of the strategies that i use when things are posted and they're misleading okay so we're going to talk now about some resources that you guys can use straight away after this session to look at articles that have been debunked online to see um experts that you can talk to to ask information if
you are reporting on copic 19 especially the vaccine rollout there are lots of different resources that you can get stuck into okay so you know we are really kind of taken back into a world where the unknown is there rumors can spread especially with every update of this story okay so it's really really important that you build a verification workflow for yourself get familiar with some of the tools get comfortable with them and see how they can be used in relation to each other as well for what
works for you okay because if you can develop a workflow for yourself it will enable you to get to the point much quicker and to verify information and move on okay so the first tool i'm going to tell you about is our own okay so if you go to g dot co forward slash fact check tools you will have access there to our own fact check explorer so the fact check explorer is there it's one of the quickest ways of essentially seeing the world's fact checks in one place this is google's attempts to do t
his so articles and facts that have been debunked and already fact-checked for you without the need of you having to go and investigate yourself if you go onto the fat chick explorer you can search by topic or publication and you'll see all the fact checks that have been done in relation to that so if i show you what it looks like once you go into the fat check explorer so it's super easy to use it's just a search bar and you type in your topic or person so let's say here i'm reporting on the co
vered 19 vaccine you can see it appears down there in my search results and i can see all the most recent fact-checked articles that have been posted okay so different claims by people on social media or around the internet that have been debunked by different publications so i can see here on the right hand side okay will there be a chip inside the vaccine this is an article from pointer and we give it a rating okay so pointer will submit it for a rating and you'll be able to see that here so t
hat fact that piece of information needs context uh this claim is misleading so you can go through and have a look at them now if there's a certain piece of information that you want to delve deeper into you can click on this link here so does the vaccine um cause infertility or not so i can click there on to boom live and i can read an article from boom live that tells me okay no it does not cause infertility and we're going to debunk it and show you how we've come to that decision okay so it's
a really great way to basically find out information without you having to do all of the work there yourself you can also search by language as well so obviously i'm here in english but you can choose to change the language or you can choose to change the url here so if i wanted french i would just change en to fr at the end there and then now i will see the articles in french okay so that's the fact check explorer it's definitely worth checking out it's kind of like a number one resource you s
hould be going to if you have a piece of information you want to see whether it's already been debunked it will save you tons of time and it's really really easy to use okay so our next uh database is from pointer now uh pointer they've got an amazing database uh full of um fact-checked articles that have been published around the world so there's over 70 different countries that have um all submitted all of their um their their articles to this database and it's in more than 40 languages there'
s over 9 000 fact checks um and these basically fact checkers that are working all over the world to bring all of these different topics together so again if i if i jump in and show you what that looks like on the front front side so you can see the front of the database here i can scroll down and i can either search for a topic i can select my country select the rating so whether it's false context false headline for example i can change the publication that it's been fact checked by or i can s
croll down here and i can see either the oldest or the newest fact checks that have been published here on the website okay and then when i'm happy and i've seen one that i'm interested in so let's say here um world health organization approved okay so let's click in and we can see a little summary of that fact-checked article and if i want to read the full thing i will just click in and i'll be taken directly to that article that has already debunked one of the claims online okay so heading ove
r to the the pointer database as well will give you access to a range of lots of different articles that have been published around the world okay so having that in your mind is a really fantastic resource that you can get started with as well um now the team at full fact they're a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners they've got a whole section on coronavirus on their website so it's called full fact coronavirus now the team there they really are fighting you know bad false informa
tion in a variety of ways from fact-checking different claims made by politicians public institutes and on social media of course they're also asking people to correct things when they get things wrong on record they're developing tech and new research to spot repeated claims and they're also campaigning as well for change uh to make you know this harmful information you know less harmful in society okay so so this is the full fact coronavirus web page and you can see it if i click here and if y
ou're just fullfact.org and you can scroll down and you can see here it's split into three sections so coronavirus brexit vaccine so let's say i go into coronavirus in this example so you can scroll down and you can filter all of their articles by all of these sub categories here or you can scroll down and see some of the top articles so how you can fact check claims against coronavirus and lots of different topics and then okay let's say if i want to go into the vaccine section i will see all t
he fat checks that the team at full fact have done and if i click into them so people giving covered 19 vaccines won't be tried as war criminals i can tap into that and you can see the claim and the verdict on that claim within the article on fullfact.org okay so you can read an article about it we'll send you links to other help and information to give you more details and context around that fact check okay so those are your three tools that you want to be using straight away so using the goog
le fat check explorer and pointer and full fat but of course there are some times where you might think okay i want to ask the experts some questions i want to you know go straight to scientists myself and ask them so there are some um places where you can do that so the first one is called learnaboutcovid19.org okay so if you head over to this website you can basically ask um some of the experts questions yourself okay so you can see here this is what it will look like if you're going to the to
ol uh it's essentially a collaboration between experts and journalists and fact checkers so if you have a question for a medical expert or a scientist you can just go on there and you can see you can access all of these experts around the world that will aim to answers to you as quickly as possible okay so you know if one of the questions hasn't been answered on the site you can submit a question and but most of the time you'll probably see that actually there's a whole range of questions that h
ave already been asked that you can access straight away so it looks a little bit like this once you're in it you can either search what you're looking for or you can go down and find a question to ask and read about okay so that's learn about covid 19. now also in learn about covert 19 they've developed um the covid19 vaccine media hub okay so this is an area which is essentially a global resource for journalists and fact checkers where you can find the latest scientific information expert opin
ion and research on the covid19 vaccines so imagine it to be kind of like a news feed of all of these expert um articles that have been written about science about covid19 vaccine okay so it's all kind of in one place that's what it's designed to be there for or of course you can ask the experts on the other side of the tool as well okay so there is also another place you could go which is science media sciencemediacenter.org now obviously um scientists and the media they're aiming to build thei
r relationship between the two different areas because i've put a little quote here which i think kind of sums the importance of it up you know the media will do science better when scientists do the media better so this is a website that's aiming to improve the relationship between scientists and experts so it's enabling science scientists to basically pass information onto journalists as quickly as possible when a news story breaks a case as much accurate information as they can as quickly as
possible and so you'll see on the website if you go on there if there's been a change to a vaccine or information that's been published in the news and that's based on the science you'll see quotes and information and analysis and articles that you can access straight away as a reporter so it's a really useful tool if you want information much quicker the next tool i'm going to draw attention to is google trends google trends is an amazing tool from google which you may or may not have already p
layed with it's basically a way that you can see what the public are talking about so what is your audience interested in it will show you what people are searching for in google on a variety of um destinations around the world okay so i'm going to jump into google trends to show you what that looks like so this is the front end of google trends and we can either search for a term or a topic within the search bar so for example if i wanted to i could search for covid19 and it will come up with a
ll different search terms it would recommend for that now i can either click on the kovid 19 vaccine here or i can scroll down and the google trends team um they've already put together information on some of the most searched topics here in the uk you can see i'm at the uk here on the top right if you are watching us from a different country today you can scroll down and see another country's information there but for now we're going to stick in the uk so you can see here there's a range of art
icles around coronavirus and information and graphics and data that you guys can use within your articles and to add context to what you're reporting on okay so i can click into here and you can see here now that the google trends team have already developed you know um graphics and charts that will enable you to get more information about what people are interested in searching for on google so we can see here search interest in lockdown worldwide past week okay so we can scroll over and use th
at or we can see the trending covered variant questions um let's just make this a little bit bigger so you guys can see uh trending uk searches on the coronavirus we can see the interest levels on the different covid variants here so you can see over time how interested people are when they're searching on google to do with the uk brazilian and south african variant and you can break this down by regions within the uk as well so areas and cities and we can just see information surrounding this t
opic okay so if you are reporting on the covert 19 vaccine definitely head over to google trends there's so much information on there that you can pick out you can use you can investigate and research further also you can share this information or you can embed it within your own websites as well so you can see here covered vaccine trends over the past week you can see these are the most talked about topics there and if you just keep going down you can see okay this is what people are searching
for during the pandemic so that could be a story in itself okay so there's so much information that you can gather from this um you can also download the data as well and visualize it within a visualization tool like flourish studio and which you will find on our website of how to use that range of information that you guys can jump into and use straight away um now another resource is the code with 19 community mobility reports so if you jump into this basically essentially you'll be able to do
wnload data to see how the community is moving about due to covert 19 okay so due to the response of let's say new lockdown levels or as the economy changes as people move move around due to covert 19 they'll give you an insight into into how the response has been in different areas of the world um now i must emphasize that these are anonymized insights okay so you won't be able to get uh detailed information of individuals of course um but you can download mobility reports directly to your comp
uter okay so if you want to download let's say a csv file you can then go and visualize that within a story and you can see here i can search by countries or regions and i can break it down by location so there's tons of information that you can get freely available online okay and regardless of of the angle of your story or what section of coronavirus or the coronavirus vaccine you're looking at there's so much information that you can take advantage of online make sure you head over to our web
site so g dot co forward slash news training as i mentioned before there are lots of different courses that you can take within your own time and they're pdf versions so you can click into them you can have the tool open on your computer and you can learn as you go okay so i'd really recommend just spending a bit of extra time diving into at all some of the visualizations that you guys have seen today um such as being made with for example flourish uh or maybe the data gift maker you can use the
se yourself okay you can do all of this yourself you just have to spend some time practicing with it um here at the google news lab we've got about 18 or 19 teaching fellows around the world speaking in different languages working with different news organizations to teach them in how to use these tools for journalists okay so if there's any questions that you guys have on the tools that we've spoken about today or on the tools that are on our website then do feel free to get in touch with us th
ere is um a support network for four newsrooms you can contact us at newslab support at google.com and of course you can always contact us if you want individual training for your newsroom okay so um my email address is carolinescott google.com definitely ping me an email if you've enjoyed what we've been speaking about today and if you would like us to come into your newsroom and talk to you about some of the other tools that we we teach within the google news lab i'd be more than happy to do s
o whether that's online or in the future in person but do get in touch with us um you know it's a really kind of friendly bunch at the google news initiative and you know all the teaching fellows around the world within google news lab very approachable on social media and on email as well so do take advantage of all the training that we have to offer now if anyone has any questions about anything that i've covered already today please do write them in the chat and i will be able to answer them
um but as i say if you think of a question later on or if you're watching this later on in the day and you're not watching this live then please just um send me an email and i'll get on to that oh we've had people from thailand that's fantastic india well i hope you've all enjoyed this session today and as i say keep in touch let us know how you get on with all of these tools and if you find even more tools that you find useful as a journalist please let us know as well because we can add to our
collection and database and and we can tell you guys more about it so thank you very much for joining today guys uh go and enjoy the rest of your day and i will speak to you all soon
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