Seven things I’ve learned by training more than 2,000 journalists with the Google News Lab

Alberto Puliafito
4 min readApr 5, 2022

One event after another, one call after another, since I started working as a Google News Lab Teaching Fellow (August 2021), counting all the appearances at the training sessions, we exceeded 2,200 units.

I also did six training events a week, among the most disparate: I met both freelancers and journalism students and associations such as ANSO; I provided workshops for the continuous training program of the Ordine dei Giornalisti, for very small, hyper-local, innovative, and for large and historical editorial offices. Each time, I brought a piece of what I know about the digital ecosystem, what I have learned from the people who work at the Google News Initiative, of the tools we have at our disposal to do our job as journalists better.

If you want to know what I learned in this journey, which will continue until July, continue reading.

1) The editorial staff of the Papersera had already foreseen everything

There is a story published for the first time about a Topolino in Brazil in 1977. Uncle Scrooge (Publisher/director of the Papersera) takes a robot to be a reporter. His journalists, Donald Duck and Fethry Duck react in two opposite ways: Fethry is happy because he thinks that the machine will replace him…

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Alberto Puliafito

Slow News Editor-in-Chief. My nickname is Malaparte. I resist against state of emergency. Formerly Blogo. Director, SEO, communication strategist.