Tech giant Google announced the launch of a new training programme for journalists to protect them from falling prey to fake news stories.
Google India said on Tuesday that it will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages over the next one year, reports IANS.
The Google News Initiative India Training Network will select 200 journalists from various cities across the country who will be trained in train-the-trainer boot camps for five days.
During this period, they will improve their skills in fact verification and training.
These trained journalists will further train more journalists at two-day, one-day and half-day workshops which will be conducted in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada in cities across India, Google India said in a statement.
According to IANS, the training will focus on fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts from First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in and DataLeads.
"Supporting trusted, authoritative media sources is a top priority for Google, which is why we are proud to collaborate with Internews, DataLeads and BoomLive to support journalists in their fight against misinformation in India," said Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, Asia-Pacific.
Liu further added, "Our goal is to train more than 200 trainers, who will then train 8,000 journalists in six languages over the next year, making this Google's largest training network in the world”.
(With inputs from IANS.)
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