Lagos
– Google on Thursday urged media personnel to take advantage of data to tell
news stories. Google: employees protest China censor friendly search engine
codenamed Dragonfly Mr Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, Google’s Communications and Public
Affairs Manager, Anglophone West Africa, made the appeal at the Data Tools
Training for Elections Reporting organised by Google.
“As
the forthcoming general elections in Nigeria approaches, Google is training and
empowering the media on the use of modern data tools for effective reporting
during the election. “Social media and online journalism have played an
important role in helping to build stable democracies, resulting from informed
voting, and as more people get online, the impact grows. “The months leading to
the Feb. 16, 2019 elections presents great opportunities for media to innovate
on their storytelling abilities through the use of online and social media
tools.
“The
essence of the training is for participants to have the knowledge and tools
necessary for innovative and insightful election reporting,” he said.
Kola-Ogunlade said that the participants would be taught how to use online
tools like fusion tables, polls, Google Advanced Search, Google trends, social
media streams and Google alerts to track and develop stories. He said that for
effective news telling with data, journalists should make use of “Data
Pipeline’’, as the core steps to tell stories with data. He said that the
biggest problem in writing with data was presentation, adding that one needed
to do proper analysis so that the story line would impact the audience.
He
urged the participants to start using the web to do what they currently did and
to understand that the web had a lot of free tools, which could be adopted and
used to have a good story.
Business
Development Manager, Google, Ms Felicia Otolorin said that the essence of the
training was to enable publishers sustain momentum in their sites during
elections using Google tools. “Elections are here and people are interested in
what is happening and the key thing to ensure that people stay in your site to
access top stories on the homepage. “Others are consolidated menus, display key
categories, highlight your top stories related to the category and others,’
‘she said.
She
urged the participants on internationalisation, which she said had to do with
the kind of audience a publisher keeps. She said that during election, other
countries would want to get information of the happenings and there was need to
have the type of audience that would give different amount of value to ones
site. The Google for Elections workshop is a one-day, hands-on certificate
programme. and is focused on using social media, visualisation and
citizen reporting tools to tell election stories. (NAN)
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