From Google Earth to data journalism: 5 free courses for technical skills journalists could use

There are countless ways to produce journalism, and, let’s face it, you can’t be great at all of them. However, there are many obtainable skills reporters can benefit from – from using geolocation to verify content from open sources to using Google Earth for visual enrichment of their stories.

While editors and managers may hesitate to let their employees spend their work time on long and time-consuming courses, some basics could be learnt relatively quickly. To that end, we put together this list of five free courses for technical skills valuable in the news media industry.

Hands-on Machine Learning

It’s 2022, and newsrooms have to deal with gigantic amounts of data the human brain couldn’t process without help. Some may choose to create databases with tags for navigation, which, if done correctly, could work out well.

But you may need more when you report on huge and long-term events, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, with loads of dis- and misinformation, thousands of photos and pieces of information from different sources. And machine learning could be the answer.

For example, the UNDP Country Office in Ukraine uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyse thousands of reports and extract information about the damaged infrastructure. It then visualises the information in its “Ukraine Infrastructure Semantic Damage Detector”. Your newsroom may consider doing something of this kind – and it could very well be not only war in Ukraine but, for instance, crime reports in your country.

In this course by Google News Initiative, you will learn how to train a Machine Learning model and see examples of what journalists can achieve with this technology. If you are not yet familiar with the topic of Machine Learning, consider going through a short “Introduction to Machine Learning” course first.

• Duration: 2-3 hours

Getting Started With Google Earth Studio

Quite often in the reporting, we inform the audience about events in places people may have never heard about or in which they don’t navigate well – for example, in the outskirts of the city or another country. Illustrating them with stock photos from search may not add anything valuable to the story, and Google Earth could help.

Google Earth has a massive store of satellite and aerial imagery, including everything from plains and lakes to individual city buildings, some in 3D. It allows you to make a short and quick video showing where your object is located and how the area around it looks more engaging than just a photo. How about creating short GIFs for the tweets about the event?

In this course, you will learn the basics of using Earth Studio, enough to try out in your reporting. However, if you wish to dive deeper and add Adobe After Effects skills into it, you may later find yourself doing map videos like Vox Atlas. So here is a short tutorial to try this combination of Earth Studio and After Effects. 

• Duration: 2 hours

Geolocation course by AFP

Geolocation is a vital skill for journalists. It is used widely in OSINT communities such as Bellingcat for reporting on armed conflicts around the world and other topics. Try this course to make sure you can geolocate a photo on your own and not rely on OSINTers.

It is divided into two courses. The first will teach you how to use the clues in a picture or video to find out where, and sometimes when, it was taken. The second introduces advanced techniques for geolocating a photo or video, also using mapping software like Google Maps, Google Street View, Wikimapia, Bing Maps, Yandex Maps, Mapillary and other tools.

• Duration: 1-2 hours

Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools

As we already mentioned, newsrooms need skills, techniques and software to deal with the wide scope of data available on the internet. It’s difficult to imagine a middle-sized outlet without a small data journalism team, or at the very least, without journalists capable of doing data journalism when needed.

Stories that could be told through data journalism are everywhere, and some could be found only through data analysis. Take an example of “Brutalised Minsk: how Belarusian police beat protesters”, where journalists visualised information about more than 1,400 people beaten by the police – where and when they were attacked, what injuries each of them received. This story could be told only through data visualisation, and the team has received a European Press Prize nomination for their work. 

The course is divided into five modules: 

• Data journalism in the newsroom
• Finding data to support stories
• Finding story ideas with data analysis
• Dealing with messy data
• Telling stories with visualisation (and Adobe Illustrator tutorial as a bonus)

• Duration: 4-5 hours per module, about 25 hours in total

Introduction to photogrammetry in journalism: Capturing your world in 3D

Photogrammetry isn’t mainstream yet, but it could very well be in the near future. It relies on new technologies and instruments such as drones, 360° cameras, and others. 

The course is taught by Ben Kreimer, a technologist working on enduring journalistic applications for drones, 360° video, photogrammetric 3D reconstructions, and other media technologies. Through the four modules of this course, you will learn what photogrammetry is and look at some examples of it in the media. 

Ben Kreimer will also teach how to create, process and publish such content. And maybe one day you will be doing the content such as this work by the BBC, where the journalists created a 3D model of the Islamic State group’s tunnels, where an ancient Assyrian palace was found.

• Duration: 8-10 hours

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