This session will equip you with practical research and reporting tools that you can use right away — and keep in mind for coming election coverage. Learn how to track and verify social media content and defend against misinformation. We’ll point to data journalism tools that can help you research and visualize your ideas, including how to mine Google Trends to spark story ideas and complement your storytelling. Explore Backlight — a new tool for investigative journalists, which indexes and parses massive amounts of documents for easy searching and collaboration. It even reads handwriting and recognizes photos. It’s perfect for data dumps from FOIA requests, and mining reports on deadline.
Maggie Farley, a Google News Lab Teaching Fellow, teaches journalists tech tools to help them thrive in the digital age. She was an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Asia, and then covered the U.N. in New York. She co-created Factitious, a digital game that playfully teaches how to discern factual news from misinformation. At American University, she was a professional fellow exploring engagement design for journalism, and taught writing. She is a fan of the Oxford comma, trapeze, and the snacks at Google.