UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s award-winning College of Communications, with a journalism tradition that dates to the early 1900s, joined a cohort of 46 schools from around the world in the recently announced Google News Lab University Network.
Google’s News Lab, with tools such as Google Search, Google Trends, Google Maps and Google Earth, has been providing training and support to professional newsrooms for years. Through the University Network, the company hopes to do the same for the next generation of journalists in their classrooms.
“The Network is designed to provide in-person training when possible, and online training materials and support to professors and students on topics ranging from Google tool fundamentals, trust and verification, immersive storytelling, data journalism, advanced search and Google Trends, data visualization, mapping and more,” wrote Nicholas Whitaker, training and development manager at Google News Lab, in a medium.com post announcing the collaboration. “We also want to celebrate and promote academic journalism projects that use Google tools. We hope to foster discussion with educators and offer them an opportunity to review News Lab curriculum and training materials to ensure that it adheres to the right level of pedagogy for journalists and students.”
The network includes 27 schools in the United States, 12 in Europe, three in Hong Kong, three in India, and one in Mexico.
The Department of Journalism, housed in the College of Communications at Penn State, was honored as the second-best journalism program in the nation as recently as 2014, according to College Magazine, an independent, student-published guide to college. In determining the ranking, College Magazine pointed to courses with a strong multimedia component, on-campus media opportunities such as The Daily Collegian, and a strong career services office that regularly makes students aware of career-building internships.
Penn State journalism students also get regular hands-on, real-life experience on campus and in settings across the globe as part of international reporting courses or partnerships with organizations such as The Associated Press or the Pennsylvania News Media Association.
Standout students led the program to three consecutive national championships (2014, 2013, 2012) in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program — often called “the Pulitzers of college journalism.” Penn State has crafted the best average finish in the Hearst Program of any school in the Big Ten Conference or Northeast during the past decade.
In addition, the College of Communications is the largest accredited mass communications program in the nation, providing resources and support for students studying journalism and four other communications majors: advertising/public relations, film-video, media studies, and telecommunications.
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