Google has used the $300 million journalism project, Google News Initiative to help battle the lack of information in society while also helping news publishers earn since the project’s introduction in 2018. Recent reports show that the tech giant is also investing in Journalist Studio, a software that provides free tools to aid reporters and media organizations.
Google explained that the new tools will prove to be useful in investigative journalism and other exercises that involve going through a lot of data and documents carefully.
Pinpoint is the main tool of Journalist Studio as it helps editors and reporters to check out documents, images, and audio files easily. The tool finds out the names and locations that appear the most in any batch of documents while also aiding reporters in diving into specific mentions of keywords in each file.
Although this may not sound like a super-incredible use of Google’s AI tech, it is a very important and useful breakthrough. Newsrooms with a few staff will find this particularly exciting because the tool comes as a boost to them as it helps them in quickly analyzing hundreds and thousands of documents.
Pinpoint could also help reporters find details in files that may be otherwise overlooked because of its ability to pull names from audio transcripts, handwritten notes, or photos of texts. Pinpoint has already been tested with investigative journalists at The Washington Post and a few other newsrooms, but Google will now make it open for reporters anywhere to sign up.
Common Knowledge Project is the other Journalist Studio tool that has been unveiled. The tool allows reporters to make interactive visualizations out of public records data with just a few clicks. There is a beta version of the tool available now.
Journalist Studio is just two products for now, but we imagine the expansion that will occur in the tools and features in the coming years will be much more exciting to journalists.