Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way journalists work and how audiences consume news. Learning to harness that power is the subject of two lunchtime workshops from Google News Initiative (GNI) to be offered at the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ).
Anyone already registered for ISOJ is welcome to attend these workshops, which are included with the price of an ISOJ ticket for in person or virtual participation. However, workshop registration is required. Register now for “Get Started with AI Tools for News” (March 27) and “NotebookLM for Journalists and Pinpoint for Journalists” (March 28). Seats are limited and the sessions are in English, without interpretation to Spanish (which will be limited to the main ISOJ sessions).
On Thursday, March 27, Iain Christie, GNI trainer, will provide a birds-eye view of Google’s mission and AI principles, including its tools to strengthen AI literacy and assist with researching, reporting and writing.
“[AI is] embedded in everything we do,” Christie said. “It’s making AI helpful for everyone.”
During Thursday’s workshop, Christie will walk participants through the basics of five Google tools: generative AI chatbot Gemini, verification search engine Fact Check Explorer, research tool Pinpoint, research and note taking tool NotebookLMand reporting assistant News Consumer Insights (NCI).
His favorite is NCI, which he calls a “one-stop shop” to help small and medium-sized publishers who are currently doing it all. Relaunched in August 2024, NCI 3.0 gives a 360-view of a news organization’s performance by connecting Google Analytics, Search Console, Ad Manager or AdSense accounts. NCI helps publishers with questions like how the audience and revenue are being developed, how articles are performing, and how the site is loading.
Christie stressed that not everyone needs to be a journalist to use these tools – they’re also for team members in ad sales, video, reader and revenue retention and other areas of the news organization.
“The role of the GNI program really is to support, sustain, offer consultancy services to allow journalism to thrive,” Christie said.
On Friday, March 28, Christie returns with another lunchtime workshop and a deeper dive into two Google tools: Pinpoint and NotebookLM.
This session will be less introduction to AI and more demonstration of these specific tools that help journalists research and report, he said.
With NotebookLM – “your personalized AI research assistant” – journalists can upload sources and get AI summaries and insights into the material provided, including citations. Google says it’s also multimodal and multilingual, allowing you to research across text, graphs, images and audio in various languages.
Meanwhile, Google says Pinpoint affords journalists and academics the ability to analyze large volumes of documents, assists with investigative reporting and breaking news analysis, helps with fact checking and collecting notes, and more.
“Journalists are using Pinpoint to search through thousands of documents, transcribe and search audio and video files, transform similarly structured documents into sortable spreadsheets, and use generative AI to get insights about their documents,” Christie said.
Both workshops can stand on their own, Christie said, but ISOJ participants are welcome to register for both.
“Google has been an ISOJ partner for more than a decade. Their lunchtime workshops have become a tradition that have benefited hundreds of journalists with practical training that impacts their work,” said professor Rosental Alves, ISOJ founder and director. “We are grateful for GNI’s support to our global conference.”
So don’t delay; make sure to reserve your spot for the workshops on Day 1 and Day 2 and harness the power of AI!