Ahead of the upcoming elections in India, Google News Initiative, in partnership with DataLeads and Internews has announced the launch of a training series to aid journalists covering the elections. The training sessions will be held in 30 cities in India between February 26 - April 6, 2019 in 10 languages namely, English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bangla, Kannada, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.

The training will include online verification and fact-checking, journalist digital safety and security, YouTube for elections coverage and data visualization for elections. Registration for the program is free of cost and open to all journalists, freelancers and journalism students who will be given slots on a first come, first serve basis.

Talking about the initiative, Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, Asia-Pacific said, “The Google News Initiative is proud to be supporting journalists in India as they prepare to cover the upcoming elections. Since 2016, Google has trained more than 13,000 journalists in India, across 200-plus newsrooms, and in 40 cities.” Google plans to train another 10,000 journalists in India with this initiative.

Last year, Google had launched the Google News Initiative India Training Network, focused on online verification and fact-checking and within six months, the Network had onboarded 241 trainers in seven languages.