New digital training options from the Google News Lab
To help foster more opportunities for journalists across Europe to learn, experiment, and innovate together, we’re expanding two training partnerships in 2017: the News Impact Summit and Academy Series and the Digital Identities Programme.
Launching the 2017 News Impact Summit & Academy Series with the European Journalism Centre
For the last two years, we’ve collaborated with the European Journalism Centre (EJC) to help thousands of journalists across Europe attend a series of free training events called the News Impact Summits.
The Summits move from city to city, but share a similar feature: the world’s leading figures in data journalism, virtual reality, and verification converge to share their learnings and best practices on stage, in classrooms, or over coffee.The events have been popular, typically selling out within days of opening registration and seeing sold out audiences across 18 events since 2015.
This year, we’re unveiling five new locations — and for the first time we’re expanding our partnership to support a new ‘Academy’ series which will provide an invited audience the chance to explore the topics in more detail.
The five Academy workshops will connect, support, and develop digital innovators in European newsrooms and start-ups. Invited participants will learn techniques and share best practices for topics like defining new revenue models, building digital products, and creating sustainable business initiatives.
Adam Thomas, the Director of the European Journalism Centre, noted that the Academy series could build off the News Impact Summits, which have “evolved to become some of the most engaging and essential media events in the calendar” to “inspire and train the next generation of innovative news leaders in topics ranging from advertising to algorithms, and from analytics to artificial intelligence.”
We’ll help the EJC take the News Impact Summit and the Academy to five cities. In Rome, the agenda will focus on relevant topics for newsrooms across southern Europe. In Hamburg, we will host a special summit in the run up to the German election. We’ll also be hosting our first event in Budapest, which will be open to journalists from across central and eastern Europe. We’re also looking forward to hosting the first News Impact Summit and Academy in Manchester and ending the year with a review of 2017 in Brussels.
You’ll find more details of the five events on our social media handle and via the EJC website: newsimpact.io
Expanding Digital Identities
Last summer, we piloted a one-day intensive workshop in Sweden, where we worked with two social media and digital experts to launch Digital Identities. The event provided training and experimentation opportunities for established journalists looking to expand their skillset. After a successful pilot in Stockholm, we’re taking the event to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Delhi.
In Sweden, senior journalists and digital experts were invited to leave the newsroom for a day and consider setting up their own experiments. The agenda also included lightning talks, design thinking workshops, and brainstorming sessions. But the real work began once the event ended. Working with event leaders Abhay Adhikari and Kathryn Geels, the journalists volunteered to share updates on their experiments ranging from small tweaks to their newsgathering to major new projects centered on gamification.
We hope to apply the lessons we learned from our pilot in Sweden to make Digital Identities even more effective in our new host cities this year.
You’ll find more details of the four events on our social media handle and via the Digital Identities website.
