Google News Lab Latest Update: Tech Giant Launches Collection of Tools, Resources to "Build Future of Media"

Google has unveiled a new initiative called the News Lab, an effort to provide resources and relevant tools to journalists. With the new initiative, Google wants to "help build the future of media."

The News Lab will essentially serve three purposes: Google's tools are made available to journalists around the world; providing useful Google data sets to the journalists; and through programs designed to build on some of the biggest opportunities that exist in the media industry today.

In the blogpost, the company also noted that it will develop new products to help journalists and the resources currently available will be updated regularly.

The search-engine giant is also focusing on citizen reporting.

"Another area we've focused our programs on is citizen reporting. Now that mobile technology allows anyone to be a reporter, we want to do our part to ensure that user-generated news content is a positive and game-changing force in media. We're doing that with three projects-First Draft, the WITNESS Media Lab, and the YouTube Newswire-each of which aims to make YouTube and other open platforms more useful places for first-hand news content from citizen reporters around the world," it noted.

Google is also working on partnerships with newsrooms to work on specific data projects.