Flourish is a Google-endorsed visualisation generator that is now free for journalists.

G Lab pays the premium

A Google News Lab partnership with Flourish developers has resulted in newsrooms getting totally free Flourish premium accounts.

As of February 2018, anyone can sign up for a free Flourish account. Flourish visualisations look good, but standard free accounts must agree to all their content being publicly visible.

The Newsroom accounts give journalists free access to premium features, including privacy settings and collaboration tools.

Limits and logins

The Newsroom accounts are exclusively for editorial use. They cannot be used to generate branded content and are explicitly not to be used for internal business reports. Flourish offers paid plans for those purposes.

The Google-Flourish partnership may be part of an efforts to seem more like a journalist’s best friend rather than a cause of old-media’s demise. Eligible journalists can take advantage of the free newsroom accounts by signing up for a standard free Flourish account, then completing a Google Forms sign-up to get it upgraded to Newsroom status.

Facilitating slick editorial content is great, but does Google do enough to balance its broader impact on pre-existing media?

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