Google Tools all Journalists should use

By Elena Eberwein

The average person Google searches three to four times per day. That statistic came from Hubspot, through a Google search.

Google’s Fundamentals for Journalists workshop was held Thursday morning. Mary Nahorniak, a U.S. Teaching Fellow for the Google News Lab, gave students training on how to use Google tools to their full capability to refine searches, set alerts, access data, and stay organized through Google’s new Pinpoint tool. 

“Pinpoint was a tool Google created for journalists and researchers,” Nahorniak said.

It is not a public-facing tool, and journalists and researchers have to request access to use it. Pinpoint is intended for users to create a collection of documents as they work on research and reporting. The tool allows users to search for text on an image, search handwritten documents, and transcribe audio all for free. 

“I like that it’s customized to journalists,” said workshop attendee Hollie Moore. 

When a user creates a collection, it is private to only them or any collaborators they invite to their collection. Pinpoint does have public collections, but it is a separate process to make a collection public, said Nahorniak. 

Another important skill for journalists is knowing how to refine a Google search. Refining a search will heed fewer results but can help journalists to find more of what they’re looking for, Nahorniak explained. 

One of the most basic refinements is using + and – to be specific about what to or not to include in a search. She gave the example of searching for information on jaguars, the animal. You can omit words like car and automobile from the search to ensure that the information is strictly related to big cats.

You can also refine a google search by website, top-level domains, cache and file type to get even more specific. 

A cache is the last saved version of a web page. On February 29, 2020, the CDC website had a table that tracked the positive cases of COVID-19 in the United States, said Nahorniak. On March 3, 2020, that table disappeared. 

By refining a search by a cache, a health reporter could go back to a date when that website held that table to verify it had been taken down. When calling the CDC to ask where the table went, a reporter would have evidence to back up their question. 

Using Google’s Advanced Search Feature can refine results by these same features. It is up to an individual user how they prefer to refine their search. Google also has an Advanced Video Search Feature that can be refined as well.  

Another helpful and underutilized feature is setting up Google Alerts and Google Scholar. Many reporters use alerts to track their bylines, said Nahorniak. She encourages students to use Scholar as a place to find sources. Most articles have hyperlinks to the author’s contact information, making it easy to contact experts. 

“Let’s talk to different people and get them represented in the news,” Nahorniak said. 

With data journalism and data visualization a huge asset to newsrooms it’s important journalists can source raw data to both support stories and to find new stories. Google’s Dataset Search is essentially a Google search but t allows you to see where data came from, where to download it from, and the last time the data was updated. 

Google’s Public Data Explorer houses public data sets and gives examples of visualizations and trends. “Behind each data point is a person who has a story to tell,” said Nahorniak. She said it’s a great place to start looking for stories. 

In an era where the phrase “fake news” is frequently used, it’s important for student journalists to verify facts included in their articles. Google’s Fact Check Explorer helps individuals search for vetted facts that have either been verified or debunked. The search will list the claim, what organization checked it, and how they rated the claim on its accuracy. 

“I didn’t know most of this,” said Aubrey Smith, another workshop attendee. She’s ready to make her Pinpoint account. 

Google offers this free training available to the public. Narhorniak also offered a cheat sheet to all of these resources and can be contacted at her email [email protected] or Twitter @Maryvale for more information.