Google News Lab and ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication are teaming up.  Their goal is to test new tools and training and encourage their use throughout journalism education.  Starting this summer, Google’s staff will meet Cronkite’s faculty and students to train them on using Google’s journalism tools.

Google News Lab was created in order to support the creation and distribution of information.  In order to accomplish this, Google provides tools, data and programs designed to help journalists and media entrepreneurs.

So if the idea is to create new, innovative tools in order to help journalists, what better place to test these tools than at one of the nation’s most recognized professional journalist programs?  The Cronkite School serves as a test bed for journalism innovation for students, professional journalists and media organizations. 

Eric Newton, Cronkite’s innovation chief (who happens to teach a class called Innovation Tools), said it’s a challenge to build innovation in the newsroom.  He also said that “one of the blocks to innovation in the newsroom is not knowing where to start because there are so many tools”.

“It was Nick Whitaker’s idea that we could help Google News Lab by reviewing some of their ideas and lessons beforehand so that they would have feedback from educators before they rolled out new content,” Newton said.

With the new partnership, Cronkite School students will have first hand access to Google News Lab’s most recent creations and also to test them prior to being made available to the public. The school will be the first-of-its-kind for trainings by Google News Lab, using Cronkite News – a multi-platform news division of Arizona PBS.  Everything will be based on its “teaching hospital” model of education, produced by students and guided by professionals.