Google News Initiative will train 8,000 journalists to curb fake news

Google had launched a$300 million Google News Imitative in March this year in order to fight the spread of fake news and team up with publishers to boost the digital journalism. The program is now making its way to India and Google had made an announced the launch of its Google News Initiative Training Network in India.

Google took it to its official blog post to announce that the training program is launched with an aim to support the journalists to have an access to a correct source of information and stop the spreading of misleading information among the Indian public. Google plans on achieving this by training around 8,000 journalists to curb the fake news and will offer the journalists the skills that are required for fact-checking and verification of News from the sources.

The GNIs (Google News Initiatives) journalists will be trained in such a way that they could easily identify the fake stories in English and six other Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada in the coming days.

Google is also planning on picking around 200 journalists and help them "hone their skills in verification and training during 5-day train-the-trainer boot camps." It is being reported that five days will offer in-person training from global news verification experts and Indian fact-checkers which will include First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in, and DataLeads. Following the list of cities where the bootcamp will be held starting by the end of July:

Location Language Date Application deadline

Gurugram English Jul 30- Aug 3 July 15

Gurugram Hindi Aug 20-24 July 15

Bengaluru Kannada Aug 27-31 July 15

Chennai Tamil September 17- 22 July 15

Hyderabad Telugu November 19- 22 September 15

Mumbai Marathi Dec 3- 7 September 15

Kolkata Bengali January 15- 19 September 15

Google will also organize 2-day, 1-day and half-day workshop so that it could train even more journalists for fact-checking news stories. This initiative will make the journalists more aware and will help in spreading the correct information as it is meant to be delivered.