The training, called PollCheck: Covering India’s Election, would cover areas like photo and video verification, data visualisation for elections, YouTube for the coverage of elections, as well as ways for journalists to keep online accounts as well as sources safe.
Google News Initiative is a programme run by Google aimed at fighting misinformation by equipping journalists with tools that would help them in verifying and debunking fake news. The India Training Network of this initiative had been launched in July 2018, and since then, the company claims that 25,000 journalists, journalism students, fact-checkers and media educators have been trained across the country.
The training for PollCheck would be open for participation by journalists, media educators, journalism students, community radio station professionals and bloggers, and the training would be held using video conferencing platform Zoom. The company has floated a Google Forms using which the interested participants can register for the training, in which the participant would be asked to indicate their profession, their organisation, the major issues they face and the PollCheck session they would like to attend.
PollCheck session for West Bengal would be held on March 13, Assam on March 15, Kerala on March 17, Tamil Nadu on March 23, and Puducherry on March 24, while the Boot Camp for Community Radio would be held on March 20. The session would run from 10:30 am to 4 pm for each of these sessions.
