BECOMING NEWS LITERATE
AUG 24
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
IN A WORLD where people get their news from a wide range of oftentimes unreliable sources, a term has emerged that is both curious and relevant: news literacy. It is defined as the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and to recognize the standards of fact-based journalism to know what to trust, share, and act on. An appreciation of the First Amendment is crucial, as is the role of a free press in a democracy.
“We always say that almost every day brings a teachable moment, and that is certainly true now,” says Alan Miller, who founded the News Literacy Project (NLP) in 2008 and who has a home on Hayes Pond in Otis. “I’ve often said that I wish that I looked a little less prescient and the need was a little less urgent, but we are where we are, and events just continue to underscore that being news literate is an essential life skill in this digital age.”
NLP is a national education nonprofit that works with educators and journalists to offer resources and tools that help students learn how to separate fact from fiction. Its mission is to advance the development and teaching of news literacy in K-12 education, and its goal is to have all students in the United States skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers. (NLP also creates resources that are applicable to or useful for people of all ages.)
As a journalist, news literacy standards are incredibly important to me. I have heard of NLP, and my interest was heightened considerably after a talk that Miller gave at the Stockbridge Library with former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron, who lives in Stockbridge and has been featured in Berkshire Magazine. The informative, passionate talk in a room packed with people only illustrated the interest in and urgency of discerning fact from fiction.
“The more people who hear about NLP, the better,” says Baron. “And the Berkshires is remarkable for its population of highly accomplished and civically engaged individuals who might advance the cause of news literacy. So, the Stockbridge Library was a good venue for further getting the word out about NLP.”
A few months later, Miller and I met at Stockbridge Coffee & Tea, and then talked more by phone for this article.
For those of us who grew up prior to the advent of the internet, daily newspapers, TV and radio news programs, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek were the go-to sources of local, national, and international news. Although many of these sources still exist and are even more widely available as a result of the internet, there are fewer of them and they are competing for people’s attention with exponentially more sources that do not seek to inform in an accurate, impartial, and transparent way. With school starting again, the presidential election coming up, and international crises such as the Russo-Ukrainian and Israel–Hamas wars, we thought that this would be a good time to highlight NLP’s multiple platforms and resources that can help us develop the tools we need to determine what’s legitimately news and what is not.
“The News Literacy Project has a number of resources now that are able to keep up with fast-moving events and to keep people informed about viral rumors, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes,” says Miller.
Okay, he has our attention.
First, let’s begin with some background. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was a reporter with the Los Angeles Times for 21 years before leaving the paper to establish NLP. He spent nearly 19 years in the paper’s Washington bureau, the last 14 as a charter member of its high-profile investigative team.
When Miller began NLP in 2008 with a focus on the secondary school level, another similar program had formed at the college level, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University that was started by former Newsday editor Howard Schneider. Both Miller and Schneider were pioneers in the field of news literacy, and both were first funded by the Knight Foundation.
Baron was on an advisory committee for the Knight Foundation when NLP’s grant was approved. It wasn’t even named NLP at the time. “Marty has been with us before there was an us,” says Miller. “I went to see him early on when he was at The Boston Globe, and he’s been the most incredible ally and advocate. He was also instrumental in getting me to the Berkshires.”
Baron says he was amazed at Miller’s dedication to the mission. “He left a highly successful career as a journalist and took a huge personal and professional risk to start NLP,” says Baron. “He saw the need for news literacy training among young people way before most of us, including me, had even thought about it.”
When NLP was formally established in 2008, the iPhone was just gaining momentum and Myspace was bigger than Facebook. “I spent a lot of time explaining to people what news literacy was and why it mattered,” recalls Miller. “There wasn’t widespread appreciation and understanding of what it meant. We started smaller, out of necessity, but also to build proof of concept, working in classroom programs with a small group of diverse and dynamic schools in New York City, the D.C. area, and Chicago. We did a lot of assessment, we created a lot of video, we saw what worked, we saw what needed to be improved. And then we built additional financial support for growth. From the beginning, the big questions were: How do you sustain it? How do you scale it? And how do you measure its effectiveness?”
Miller always knew that technology would be the path to scale. In 2015, NLP raised money to develop a virtual classroom, which was launched in May 2016.
Then the 2016 presidential election happened—a watershed for NLP during a time when disinformation was rampant and Americans were becoming more divided. “I felt we went from being a voice in the wilderness to an answer to a prayer,” says Miller. “We had educators coming to us and saying, ‘This is the most important thing I could be teaching. Thank you so much for making this available.’”
All of NLP’s resources are available at no cost. In the 2023-2024 school year, more 19,000 educators tapped into its Checkology virtual classroom and NLP’s other resources and programs. The Sift is a weekly newsletter that empowers educators to teach news literacy by highlighting current examples of misinformation, journalism and press freedom topics, and social media trends. NewslitNation connects NLP’s educators as a community of practice with their own website, newsletter and events. (A total of 607 educators in Massachusetts alone used Checkology and NLP’s other resources and programs with 20,242 students in the 2023-2024 school year.)
In NLP’s District Fellowship Program, school districts apply, and those that are selected commit to creating a cohort of educators who will work with the project and peers elsewhere to develop a plan to embed news literacy education districtwide. For the upcoming school year, 43 districts applied and nine were accepted into the two-year program (including the Los Angeles Unified School District and four others in California). The fellowship’s three separate cohorts include 17 districts in 13 states that reach a total of nearly 1 million students.
For the general public, RumorGuard, a web platform that curates and debunks real-world examples of viral misinformation, attracted nearly 250,000 unique visitors in the past year. Get Smart About News is a free weekly newsletter that offers a rundown of the latest topics in news literacy—including trends and issues in misinformation, social media, artificial intelligence, journalism and press freedom. Modeled on The Sift for educators, it also provides a video series that features professional journalists.
NLP’s various campaigns, including National News Literacy Week, also have had a far-reaching impact. (The next National News Literacy Week is January 27–31, 2025; the theme is “The Power of Influencers.”) There are public campaigns in which NLP puts up its own pages about how to get credible information on those subjects, such as the current Election 2024: Be informed, not misled, to help voters identify credible information this elections season.
An important step in NLP’s evolution was hiring its first COO, Chuck Salter, who brought a background in education (he was a school superintendent) and nonprofit management in the Bay Area. While Salter and a core group of NLP’s 40 employees are based in Washington, D.C., the staff is spread out throughout the country. His hiring in 2018 was instrumental in building out the organization and its capacity, while freeing up Miller to focus on fundraising and a broader vision. In 2022, Salter became CEO. Miller, whose primary residence is in Bethesda, Maryland, continues to raise money, do occasional speaking engagements, and oversee NLP’s National Journalism Advisory Council.
Miller underscores how pervasive and powerful misinformation and disinformation are. Tens of millions of Americans deeply believe in conspiracy theories and are willing to act upon them. People can choose where they get their information, and that’s often from places that confirm their pre-existing beliefs. The algorithms reinforce those beliefs, further polarizing people and locking them into their partisan filter bubbles.
“We have reached the point where we not only cannot agree on what the facts are; we cannot agree on what a fact is, and we cannot come together to have a civil civic dialogue about how to solve major problems,” says Miller. “Disinformation has always been around, as well as partisanship, but the digital age has accelerated both because it’s so easy to reach people of like-minded visions online and shut out opposing views. Now we have AI, with the potential to amplify this at an enormous scale, through all mediums, including video where we are already seeing people supposedly saying and doing things they never said or did. So you’ve got not only people believing lies and distortions, but you also have a lot of people who simply don’t know what to believe, or people who may increasingly not believe anything. This is the realm in which tyrants thrive and dictators emerge.”
At its core, the NLP is rigorously nonpartisan, which is something that Miller and others on the board brought from their journalism backgrounds. They have a very strict policy that staff cannot get involved in partisan campaigns and make partisan posts, even on a personal level. “We’ve really built this in very intentionally, from the beginning,” says Miller. “It’s something that I’m extremely proud of. That has allowed us to be in red states, purple states, and blue states. We are working with school districts in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, and Iowa as well as the biggest urban districts in New York, LA, and Chicago.”
At one point, NLP worked to reach the broader public as well as students but decided last year to double down on its original education focus. “With students, we can get them for hours at a time,” says Miller. “With the public, you’re lucky if you get them for minutes at a time. With students, we can do assessments so we can show we’re moving the dial. We could have meaningful metrics in terms of our goals with educators and with students and schools. It’s very hard to define what success looks like with the public.” (At the same time, NLP has continued to make resources available for all ages.)
NLP has its work cut out for it. Unlike some European countries, there is not one unified national education system in the United States. It’s essentially 50 education systems that make their own standards. Within each state, individual districts and even individual schools decide how they’re going to meet those standards and what resources they’re going to use.
“We’re working on two things to create systemic change, both of which are relatively new in terms of our mission,” says Miller. “One is to begin to do advocacy work—not lobbying, but advocacy—in certain states to change the state learning standards so that this critical thinking skill is required before high school graduation, which is how you ultimately fix the problem. The second piece is our District Fellowship Program. The biggest challenge is getting in front of enough schools and districts.”
NLP has received two major national awards in the last year, including the highest honor from the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program, the David M. Rubenstein Prize, in recognition of NLP’s outstanding efforts to help people of all ages identify misinformation and help stop its spread. NLP’s Checkology also received the Webby Award in the category of Websites and Mobile Sites—Responsible Information, which recognizes products, platforms, software and other technologies working to combat disinformation, misinformation and false or misleading information online.
NLP would like to make further inroads in states like Massachusetts, which it considers a “legislative watch” state. This means that some form of legislative action is underway toward the expansion of media literacy education. In the case of Massachusetts, a model bill has been introduced that includes media literacy as part of a social emotional learning task force bill.
Locally, NLP has connected with Peter Dillon, superintendent of Berkshire Hills Schools, to look at possibly implementing news literacy education in the high schools. From time to time, educators are approached by parents who don’t understand what they are doing, so NLP has prepared a letter about what news literacy is and isn’t. “The key thing is that we teach people how to think, not what to think,” says Miller.
NLP’s approach to schools is “top down, bottom up, and middle out,” says Miller. “Educators find us, we go to conferences, we’re on social media, educators tell each other about us. Then we work at the district level, and in some cases, even the state level, which is a way to get to wider numbers. A district will sign off on NLP’s resources and promote them districtwide. Middle out is the Fellowship Program, where NLP is looking to embed news literacy education within the district.” NewslitNation is NLP’s news literacy educator network. At last count, there were more than 19,000 educators involved.
Miller learned early on not to develop an elective program or anything that displaces any other class in a school’s curriculum. NLP has created highly flexible resources for middle and high schools that can work in social studies, history, government, English, journalism, humanities, and science classes. Checkology is completely unlocked. Educators can do one lesson or all 20 lessons. They can do it for a week or a couple weeks. They can do news literacy Fridays. They can have students watch the lessons at home and discuss them in class. Librarians also use NLP’s resources.
Teachers can use any lessons that work in whatever subjects they’re teaching. Science is a special area because there are all kinds of issues involving vaccines and climate and so on within that subject. So NLP has created three lessons geared to science teachers: data, health, and science. The other lessons are not tied to a specific subject but are broadly applicable. They focus on such topics as arguments and evidence; bias; the watchdog world of journalism; infozones (which explore the difference between news, opinion, advertising, and propaganda); conspiratorial thinking, and misinformation. And anyone can access the lessons.
“We believe that news literacy is an essential survival skill today,” says Miller. “Most important, it is a key to creating a healthier and sustainable democracy.”
On Wednesday, September 25, Alan Miller will moderate a panel on AI and audience trust as part of a two-day event, “AI and the Newsroom: Navigating What’s Next.”
The event will be held in the Lecture Hall at the Pulitzer Building on the Morningside Campus of Columbia University. It is sponsored by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University Journalism School. It is free and open to the public with advance registration required, and it will very likely be live-streamed.
Sites connected to the News Literacy Project
(newslit.org):
For Everyone:
RumorGuard: rumorguard.org
Get Smart About News weekly newsletter: newslit.org/get-smart-newsletters
Election 2024: Be informed, not misled:
News literacy in the age of AI:
National News Literacy Week:
For Educators:
Checkology virtual classroom:
Newroom to classroom:
Resource library:
NewsLit Nation:
The Sift weekly newsletter:
Professional Learning platform:
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