The News Literacy Project

Nieman Reports:  News Literacy Project: Students Figure Out What News and Information to Trust

By Alan C. Miller

The News Literacy Project was conceived when I discovered that I could speak to my daughter’s sixth-grade classmates about my job without embarrassing her.

In 2006, I spoke to 175 students at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Bethesda, Maryland about what I did as an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and why journalism mattered. Julia’s hug told me that I had succeeded with her; the thank-you notes that followed told me that I had connected with her classmates.

Concerned with both the implosion of the news business and the challenges posed to Julia’s generation by the explosion of news and information sources, I began to think about the prospect of journalists, both active and retired, teaching students in classrooms across the country how to sort fact from fiction in a digital world. Two years after talking with those sixth-graders, I exchanged my 29-year newspaper career for a new journalistic mission.

That germ of an idea has evolved into a national program that recently completed its first full year in the classroom. In the 2009-10 school year, the News Literacy Project worked with 21 English, history and government teachers in seven middle schools and high schools in New York City, Bethesda and Chicago, reaching nearly 1,500 students. More than 75 journalists spoke to students and worked with them on projects.

We provide original curriculum materials that we adapt to the subject being taught. Whatever the underlying subject matter, our curriculum focuses on four pillars:

• Why does news matter?


• Why is the First Amendment protection of free speech so vital to American democracy?


• How can students know what to believe?


• What challenges and opportunities do the Internet and digital media create?

I hired Bob Jervis, the former head of social studies for the public schools in Anne Arundel County, Maryland to work with me to develop the curriculum materials. They are built around more than 20 engaging activities dealing with topics as diverse as viral e-mails, Google and other search engines, Wikipedia and the news. Some can be done by teachers, some by journalists, and some by either. Teachers choose the ones that best fit their classes.

Some teachers have done the unit during just a few weeks; others have embedded it in their coursework throughout the year. They deliver it in three phases: initial activities and the introduction of our “word wall” of basic journalism and news literacy terms and concepts, presentations by two to four journalists to each class, and a culminating hands-on student project.

We train the journalists to concentrate on our four pillars, to use anecdotes and activities to engage the students, and to include extensive time for Q. and A. and discussion. Our local coordinators work with the journalists to plan their presentations and to connect them in advance with the teachers.

Our goal is to give young people the critical thinking skills to be better students today and better-informed citizens tomorrow. We also want them to appreciate quality journalism and to use it as the standard against which to measure all information.

One of our pilot projects was at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, where we started with Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. government classes in the spring of 2009. This past school year we added English classes and reached about 625 students in the ninth, 10th and 12th grades.

“This is nirvana for me,” English teacher Marilee Roche said. “I’d give up ‘Hamlet’ for this.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in classes at Whitman. It’s been exhilarating to see journalists connect with students and spark lively discussions about such issues as identifying bias, assessing fairness, and verifying information, whether for a research paper or an investigative report.

I’ve also learned a great deal about the students’ own consumption habits, biases and views. They get a lot of information from social media or friends. Few read newspapers (either online or in print, even if their parents subscribe to one). Many don’t follow the news at all and most aren’t aware of the watchdog role of the press in a democracy. Before exposure to the project, few had any idea of the kind of reporting and vetting it generally takes to get a story into print or on the air.

I’ve also observed widespread distrust of the mainstream media. Students often feel that all journalism is driven by bias—political, commercial or personal. The students themselves frequently fail to distinguish between news and opinion in a media culture where those lines are increasingly blurred.

My experience has underscored the importance of the project’s mission. Former colleagues and others have launched worthy efforts to find new ways to fund and deliver journalism in the digital age. But that is not enough. Without a demand for quality journalism (on any platform) from the next generation, what future will it have?

So, what does a news literacy lesson look like? Here are some snapshots:

• Gwen Ifill of “The PBS NewsHour” and “Washington Week” explaining how she handles bias: “I hope you never know what I think. I’m there to provide you the information so you can decide. I have to keep open the possibility that the other guy has a point. … I have to be an honest broker.


• Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times describing how she spent the entire previous day nailing down a single name: that of the third gate-crasher at the infamous state dinner that President Barack Obama hosted for the prime minister of India at the White House in November.


• Peter Eisler of USA Today discussing accountability: “Never trust anybody who doesn’t admit they make a mistake. Never trust anyone in life who doesn’t admit they make a mistake.”


• James V. Grimaldi of The Washington Post asking students what they knew about a shooting that had occurred near the school the previous evening, then pressing them on how they had learned this information, whether they believed it and why.

In one memorable presentation, Brian Rokus, a CNN producer, showed the students video excerpts from a report he did with Christiane Amanpour about the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea in 2008. 

The students got a glimpse of a country without First Amendment protections of free speech. They saw the minders who shadowed the tightly restricted American journalists. Rokus also passed around a copy of The Pyongyang Times with its full-page paeans to the nation’s “Dear Leader.”

He then handed out an Associated Press report of a speech that President Obama had made to Congress and asked the students to cross out everything they would censor if they were the editor of The Pyongyang Times and Obama was the “Dear Leader.”

Sometimes the lessons begin even before the journalist arrives. Prior to her visit, NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard asked the teacher to ask the students to find out everything they could about her. When Shepard asked the students what they had discovered, one named the street on which she lived, another said she taught at American University and a third said she had attended her high school reunion. All three statements were wrong.

“You absolutely have to check out all information and make sure it’s accurate,” Shepard said. She then shared the journalistic maxim “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” (We’ve created our own “Check It Out” button with our logo that we ask teachers to present to students when they complete our unit.)

At times, our brand of authentic learning literally brings journalistic history into the classroom. Former Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Tyler Marshall recalled the emotional scene when he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He then picked up and displayed two pieces of the wall that he had carried home. The students gasped.

At the end of our unit, we ask teachers to assign a hands-on project to demonstrate real understanding. Options include creating a newspaper, holding a mock press conference, or preparing an oral history.

The students at Whitman created a video, song, online game, board game, and other projects that reflected what they learned about news literacy—and presented it to the class. They showed that they absorbed the project’s lessons and can find creative ways to collaborate and share them with their classmates.

As Colin Mealey and Adam Schefkind, two of the students, sang in their final project, “Wikipedia Rap”:

It’s really important to know what to believe.

You gotta know where and why and what to read.

Search your information and check it twice.

’Cause getting it wrong will come at a price.

Alan C. Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He is the founder and executive director of the News Literacy Project. 

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Nieman Reports:  Critical Thinking About Journalism: A High School Student’s View

By Lucy Chen

In the spring of 2009, as I was daydreaming about warm weather and the smacking of flip-flops on the boardwalk, I was jolted back into reality by the start of a new unit in my Advanced Placement U.S. government class—the News Literacy Project. My teacher promised that it would be interesting and entertaining. I doubted him.

I was wrong; it was fun and fascinating. We learned a lot about topics such as the importance of accurate news reporting, the implications of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech for journalists and ordinary citizens, guidelines for finding trustworthy information, and the challenges of living in a digital world. It was almost easy to pay attention because the lessons directly related to my life, my decisions, and my observations of the world around me.

Journalists came to speak with us, and they reinforced our learning by relating what we were studying to their own careers. Instead of reading a worksheet, we heard from Mark Halperin, a book author and political analyst for Time, who gave us examples of how the First Amendment has protected his work. Pierre Thomas from ABC News responded to our questions about the daily responsibilities and tasks of journalists. Thomas Frank of USA Today showed us how he uses primary source documents in reporting.

Interacting with these journalists changed how I view the process of gathering information. Now I appreciate a lot more the hard work that goes into digging for news. These speakers described the responsibility they have to report the facts accurately and objectively, a task that is much more difficult than I thought it was. Sometimes people won’t talk to reporters. At other times, figuring out exactly what happened turns out to be quite complicated. But a journalist’s job is to find the information they need, decipher it, and convey a story coherently.

Occasionally, I had watched the evening news with my parents and read the newspaper, but I never fully realized the impact that news had on my daily life. And studying news literacy taught me how to gather and assess my own stream of information, whether it comes from a newspaper, a TV show, or the Internet.

Throughout this process, I grew more skeptical about the facts I read or hear, especially those I find online, where anyone can post information about anything. The guidelines presented in the unit helped me determine whether a source was accurate and reliable—and knowing this made me better at selecting information in an ever-widening sea of sources.

For my final project, I created a fun quiz that asked several questions based on critical thinking skills I had learned. The questions I used are ones I felt would help to judge a person’s ability to select credible sources and reliable information, especially on popular Web sites that my peers visit frequently. One key aspect of my project is using common sense and not taking every fact online for granted. If something sounds too good to be true or if it sounds fake—it probably is. Based on the answers chosen, the quiz taker would be described as either a “silly” or “savvy” news consumer.

In addition to expanding my interest in journalism, the News Literacy Project taught me lessons that are proving to be useful in my English class, my interactions with people, and my daily newsgathering. And I knew they would be helpful in my first job. In fact, they already are. This spring I joined the staff of our high school paper.

Lucy Chen will be a junior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. She works on the school paper, The Black & White. Videos about her project and those of other students are online at YouTube.

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USA Today: As journalism changes, so must you

By Brent Cunningham and Alan C. Miller

As the lines separating news and entertainment, opinion and fact, and professional and amateur increasingly blur, every week presents a new chapter in the debate over the definitions of "journalist" and "journalism." Is James O’Keefe, an activist filmmaker, a partisan provocateur or an investigative reporter? Did the National Enquirer’s John Edwards love-child scoop deserve a Pulitzer Prize? What does it mean that the anonymous people who uploaded cellphone video of a young woman dying during protests in Iran won a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors?

Our culture of news and information has never been richer or more democratic; anyone with an Internet connection can contribute to the public conversation. As a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism makes clear, we have become a nation of news grazers whose "relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized and participatory."

But as the concept of "journalism" expands to include citizens with cellphone cameras, the microblogging service Twitter and social media such as Facebook, some of the developments that make this new media reality so full of potential also make it fraught. That same Pew survey found that 70% of respondents feel overwhelmed by the amount of news and information from different sources, and 72% think most sources of news are biased.

The traditional news hierarchy has been upended. With actual news, and items that look suspiciously like news, coming at us from a variety of outlets, how do we know what to trust? How do we distinguish credible information from raw information, misinformation and propaganda? And if all information is created equal, as the flattened informational landscape sometimes suggests, why will anyone seek out quality journalism — especially if we think it’s all driven by bias anyway?

Informed, engaged

There is a need for distinctions. All information is not created equal, and it is crucial for the health of our democracy that people have the skills to find what is credible — and to understand why the distinctions matter. This is particularly important for the next generation of news consumers, who spend ever more time accessing (and creating and passing along) entertainment and information on an evolving array of digital devices but are not being given the tools — or even being taught the need — to sort fact from fiction. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 8- to 18-year-olds spend an average of seven hours and 38 minutes each day on entertainment media — a 20% increase in the past five years. It also found that "use of every type of media has increased over the past 10 years, with the exception of reading" — and reading, of course, includes newspapers and magazines.

Despite the ability, with just a few keystrokes, to drill down into the rich veins of news and information online, some young people consider Google their primary information source. This study amplifies one from 2007 by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard that many teens and young adults are " ill-equipped to process the hard news stories they encounter."

The nascent news-literacy movement has begun to address this challenge. The Center for News Literacy, a news literacy course at Long Island’s Stony Brook University and the News Literacy Project — which is in seven middle schools and high schools in New York City, Bethesda, Md., and Chicago — are giving students the skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news in all its forms. But news literacy is not widely taught in U.S. schools, and the focus on standardized testing has tended to drive out "civics" or "current events" courses. We need a national effort to create a savvy, digital-age citizenry that is informed and engaged.

The Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, which was released last month, offers an important opportunity to increase news-literacy education to millions of students. The plan, authorized in the $787 billion stimulus package last year, is a long-overdue effort to shore up our digital infrastructure by extending high-speed Internet access to the entire country.

Think like journalists

But once the infrastructure is in place and the information is flowing, how will people use it? Gone are the days of passive news consumption, where we all tuned in to the evening newscast. Today, citizens need to think like journalists because they increasingly are serving as informational gatekeepers, both by creating and publishing original content online and by passing on (and thereby endorsing) news and information created elsewhere.

For the professional media, increasing news literacy is an opportunity to build an audience for public-service journalism. About 75 active and retired journalists have participated in News Literacy Project classes, sharing their experiences and answering questions about quality journalism. Fourteen news organizations are participating in the project. We encourage more news outlets to endorse news literacy and find ways to get involved.

Sustaining serious journalism in the digital age is a topic of much discussion and experimentation, most of which focuses on the product — the supply side of the information equation. But there will be no solution without demand from a citizenry that understands and values quality journalism.

Brent Cunningham is the managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Alan C. Miller is the executive director of the News Literacy Project.

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Edutopia:  A Program Teaches Teens What to Believe in the Digital World

The News Literacy Project helps secondary school students separate fact from fiction online.

It’s a jungle out there when it comes to searching for news and information online. A simple search can result in links that appear equally valid but could vary in accuracy, from a reputable newspaper’s reported article to a spoof site that includes outright lies. For young students, finding reliable information can be a challenge.

To bridge this gap, in early 2009 theNews Literacy Project started bringing seasoned journalists into secondary school classrooms to help teenagers and preteens evaluate and create reliable information. The program is now in five schools, in Bethesda, Maryland, plus New York City and Chicago, and hopes to extend to Los Angeles by 2010. (Contact the News Literacy Project to explore bringing the program to your school.)

Visiting news professionals work with students to answer four questions:

• Why does news matter?


• Why is the First Amendment protection of free speech so vital to American democracy?


• How can students know what to believe?


• What challenges and opportunities do the Internet and digital media create?

To answer these questions, students create projects that vary from a Monopoly-esque board game called Speechopoly, where players land on and purchase spaces representing First Amendment cases, to a mock television show that cautions viewers not to accept everything they read on Wikipedia. (See high school students at Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School work on model news-literacy projects in the YouTube video embedded below.)

Evaluating information online is an important digital-age skill. Google research scientist Daniel Russell estimates that students can access roughly a million times more content through Internet searches than previous generations could find at the a university library.

"Most students today don’t have the tools to navigate a way among the tsunami of sources of information available of widely varying purpose, accountability, and reliability," says Alan Miller, the News Literacy Project’s founder and executive director, who is also a former investigative reporter. "In the information age, everyone has to learn to think like a journalist."

To that goal, the News Literacy Project provided the following tips for your students to use while evaluating information:

• Think critically about news and information: Who created the information? Can you tell? For what purpose? Is the information verified? If so, how? What are the sources? What is the documentation? Is it presented in a way that is fair?


• Ask yourself, "What is it that I’m viewing?": Is it news? Opinion? Gossip? Raw information? Advertising? Propaganda? How can you tell?


• Look for bias in news and information: Watch for loaded or inflammatory words. Does the author clearly have an agenda? Is more than one side of a story or argument presented? Is the subject of the report given a chance to respond?


• View high-quality journalism as a benchmark against which to measure other sources of information: This step includes an independent and dispassionate search for reliable, accurate information, verification rather than assertion, a commitment to fairness, transparency about how information was obtained, and accountability when mistakes are made.


• Beware of information found on Wikipedia; it can be changed by anyone at any time. This fact makes it uncertain that you are getting accurate information at a given moment. However, the primary sources linked in Wikipedia entries are a rich trove of reliable information.


• Act responsibly with information you share and create: Exercise civility, respect, and care in your online communications; remember that information on the Internet lives forever and you have no control over who sees it or what they do with it. Do not expect emails to be private.


• Do not allow yourself be fooled: Nobody likes to be taken in. If it sounds too good or too incredible to be true, it probably isn’t true. Good places to check urban myths are the Annenberg Policy Center’s FactCheck.org and Snopes.com.

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Media Bistro’s FishbowlNY:  The News Literacy Project: Bringing Accountability Into the Classroom

Last night, Time Warner hosted a litany of major media players, all gathered in support of The News Literacy Project. Founded by Alan Miller, who left his investigative reporter position at the Los Angeles Times to do the unthinkable - teach students to think critically about the barrage of information thrown at them on the Internet—the program attracted the attention of board members like NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and Paul Mason, formerly of ABC News. Also on hand yesterday evening was The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., one of the evening’s co-hosts and participants in last night’s silent auction to raise money for the NLP.

Launched last spring, the NLP brings journalists from across the media world to social studies, English, and history classes in middle and high schools in New York City, Maryland, and Chicago where they teach students how to think critically and pick out reliable information from the overwhelming amount of news that bombards them every day.

Last night’s fundraiser included panels with some of the inaugural members of the program, including Anabel Rivas, a graduate of New York’s Facing History School (one of the three public schools that participated in the first NLP program), as well as Facing History’s principal Gillian Smith, Vice Principal Mark Otto and AP English teacher Kristina Wylie, whose classroom was one of the first to benefit from the News Literacy Program.

O’Brien moderated a panel discussion that included several students who had participated in the program, letting each one speak about how journalists visiting their classroom taught students about everything from sourcing material to civic accountability. By focusing on middle and high school students, Miller hopes to instill some of the ethics and skills of reporting on young people who may not even plan on being journalists, he said. The goal is that the students will come out of the program with the critical reasoning skills of a journalist, and become the critically thinking news consumers of the future.

Later in the night, minglers were encouraged to bid on the auction items, which ranged from a two-week internship with O’Brien to “A Day In The Life at ‘60 Minutes,’” as well as a lunch date with Sulzberger, where you and five friends could get a personalized tour of the Times newsroom from the publisher himself. We also saw two tickets being bid on for an “Iron Chef” taping. By the time we left, the internship with O’Brien was far ahead of any other auction, with a lead of approximately $800.

The irony didn’t escape us that most of the board members and media companies involved in The News Literacy Project have been fighting to stay in business and compete with digital media, yet were funding a project that applies seemingly to no better resource besides. Many of those present talked about helping students use the Internet to search for reliable sources of news, seemingly with the hope that those reliable sources will be traditional sources of journalism like the Times or CNN. “We realized that these students were getting their news from the Web,” Miller explained. “So we wanted to give them the tools to be able to sort through it.”

A short video clip shown during the middle of the event showed students eagerly snatching up free copies of the Times. If they can keep just some of that hunger for news as they grow up, our industry may have a chance—whether its future is online or in print.

To find out more about the News Literacy Project, visit their website, http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org.

By Drew Grant

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Southwest News-Herald:  Marquette Pilot Program Features Columnist Talk

Marquette Pilot Program Features Columnist Talk

The New Literacy Program kicked-off its pilot program Tuesday at Marquette Elementary School, 6550 S. Richmond St.

The guest speaker was Chicago Tribune columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Clarence Page.

The program, which gained support from the McCormick Foundation, involves journalists, both retired and active, as well as school teachers, to work on subjects including English, social studies and history.

Students learn how to tell the difference between fact and opinion, as well as advertising and propaganda.

Courtney Rogers, a teacher at Marquette, introduced the program’s curriculum in five sixth-grade classes this month.

The New Literacy Project is partnering with LISC, a not-for-profit organization that helps develop healthy neighborhoods through capital and other resources.

The goal of the project is to help students understand the First Amendment and the value of free media. It also sets out to empower students to produce information that is based on evidence, as opposed to believing everything they see on television or read in magazines.

Page was the event’s guest speaker. He encouraged students to follow their dreams and ambitions in order to become successful in life.

He also conducted a question-and-answer session with some of the students and even fielded some powerful questions.

One student asked if it makes him nervous what people feel about his column when they read it.

Page responded by saying “that the best idea is the one that goes off in someone’s mind, but when it is published, it is open for criticism and could either be loved or hated by the reader.”

He said that when “deadline hits, whatever he has written is what he is going with.”

He teased the crowd saying that he always tells his wife that when he passes away, he wants her to write “nothing concentrates the mind like a firm deadline” on his tombstone.

For more information about the New Literacy Program, visit www.thenewliteracyproject.org.

By Nada Shamah

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Brooklyn Daily Eagle:  The News:  What’s True?

Teaching Youngsters to Discern

Columbia Journalism Review:  Leap of Faith

Inside the Movement to Build an Audience of Citizens

What inspired you to become a journalist?

I always liked writing, and I was also into photography. And I knew that the way I grew up was different from the way I was told I grew up—I wanted to figure out what the difference was. Also, I couldn’t imagine working behind a desk from nine to five each day, wearing a tie.

What if a source lies to you?

Sometimes you’ll hear a great story, right, and you’ll really want to believe it. But you have to check things out—the line in journalism is, ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’

What happens if you make a mistake in a story?

One of the hallmarks of a good newspaper is that when they make a mistake, they admit it. A good paper will try to explain not just that they made a mistake, but how they made it. It’s part of our contract with our readers.

David Gonzalez, a metro reporter and columnist for The New York Times , stands in front of a history class at the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn. More precisely, he is pacing, energetically, as he responds to questions fired at him, with equal energy, by a roomful of eighth-graders.

Do you ever use anonymous sources?

Where are corrections printed?

How do you find your stories?

Smiling—beaming—in the back of the classroom during the press-conference-in-reverse is Alan Miller, a former Los Angeles Times reporter—he won a 2003 Pulitzer for his series on the defective Marine Corps’ Harrier attack jet—who is also responsible for today’s class. In early 2008, Miller founded the News Literacy Project, a program that mobilizes journalists both practicing and retired to share their profession with young people—to get them excited about journalism, and to help them navigate through the sea of news and sort the good from the bad. “I spoke about journalism to my daughter’s sixth-grade class,” Miller explains, “and was really surprised by what they didn’t know about the basics of journalism.” Positive student feedback from that talk convinced Miller of the need to teach students what standard history and civics classes generally don’t: how to be savvy consumers of news.

Having just completed its pilot phase, the project has brought journalists from The New York Times, Time magazine, USA Today, NPR, 60 Minutes, and other outlets to schools in New York City and Bethesda, Maryland. Miller hopes to expand to classrooms nationwide—he is exploring the prospect of launching a pilot in Chicago this fall, and in Los Angeles in 2010.

One of the members of the project’s board is Howard Schneider, the former editor of Newsday and the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University. Schneider, too, saw the need for news-literacy education, as he explained in the Fall 2007 issue of Nieman Reports. “The ultimate check against an inaccurate or irresponsible press,” he realized,

never would be just better-trained journalists, or more press critics and ethical codes. It would be a generation of news consumers who would learn how to distinguish for themselves between news and propaganda, verification and mere assertion, evidence and inference, bias and fairness, and between media bias and audience bias—consumers, who could differentiate between raw, unmediated information coursing through the Internet and independent, verified journalism.

Most journalists, Schneider noted, largely ignore the issue of educating consumers, focusing instead on the supply side of the journalism equation. To combat that, Schneider and his Stony Brook colleagues created a fourteen-week news-literacy course at the university, which addresses such topics as objectivity, fairness, sourcing, and navigating the Web. To date, more than three thousand undergraduates have taken the class—and not just journalism students.

Both the Stony Brook course and the News Literacy Project are getting high marks from students. “Now I get the gossip, and everything else that everyone’s saying about the world,” says Daysha Williams, an eighth-grader at Williamsburg Collegiate who took the NLP pilot course this winter. “It’s like, okay, cool, but do you really know about it, or did you just get that from someone else?” Her teacher, Ryan Miller, sees the change, as well. “Three weeks ago, a lot of my students didn’t know what to look for in a newspaper article, or what Google actually did. Now they do, and I can build on that in class.”

That building-up is crucial. According to David T. Z. Mindich, a journalism professor and the author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News, “It appears that if you don’t get into the news habit by your early twenties, you’ve missed the boat.”

‘Reach Them Where They Are’

The crisis facing journalism, though we often affix the word “financial” to it, is best understood in the context of an even more expansive problem: the broad decline of civic engagement. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s 2000 study of the dissolution of civic life in America, owes much of its instant-icon status to the fact that the data it aggregated proved what many Americans already sensed: that we’re increasingly isolated from one another, and increasingly disillusioned about politics and other features of civic life. The downward trends are so familiar, at this point, they hardly need detailing: declining participation in civic events, declining newspaper readership, declining knowledge about American democracy and the current events that inform it. And those declines are particularly precipitous among young people. The average newspaper reader is fifty-five years old; less than a fifth of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim to read—or even look at—a daily paper. As Evan Cornog put it in a 2005 essay in CJR, “When only 41 percent of teenagers polled can name the three branches of government while 59 percent can name the Three Stooges, something is seriously amiss.”

Yet there’s reason for optimism amid all the statistical gloom. Some brighter stats, courtesy of a December 2008 Pew study: during the 2008 presidential campaign, 33 percent of Millennials (the generation born between 1977 and 1996) interacted with a 2008 presidential campaign—by visiting a candidate’s Web site, trying to convince family or friends to vote for a candidate, or visiting a candidate’s page on a social-networking site—while only 29 percent of Baby Boomers, and 26 percent of Gen Xers, did so. CNN’s viewership among the eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic shot up from 60,000 a night in February 2007 to 218,000 a night in February 2008—a jump likely fueled by the historic nature of the presidential campaign.

And it’s not merely the excitement of politics that engages young people: volunteerism, a classic measure of civic sensibility, is also on the rise. “New evidence from multiple sources confirms that those Americans who were caught by the flash of September 11 in their impressionable adolescent years are now significantly more involved in public affairs and community life than their older brothers and sisters,” Robert Putnam and Thomas Sandler wrote in a 2005 Washington Post op-ed. Young people also consume news in a more broadly “civic” setting than their parents and grandparents did. Millennials are more likely to get their news indirectly, via e-mail forwards, Twitter links, and the like, than they are from news outlets themselves. Ubiquity, though, has a way of compromising responsibility. Thus, the resonance of the quote, from a college student participating in a 2008 focus group: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

We have, then, something of a paradox when it comes to young people’s civic engagement: they are reasonably engaged socially and politically, yet they too often lack the information necessary to translate their interest into a deeper, more substantive form of civic engagement. Young people are more socially connected, and have at their disposal more news and information than their parents could have imagined during their own youth. Lacking, however, is their knowledge of—and appreciation for—the kind of civic-minded news and information that a democracy requires, and that journalists produce. “Two out of ten times, I’m blown away by how well the kids articulate something they know,” says Audrey Harris, a social studies teacher at Williamsburg Collegiate who has been using Alan Miller’s curriculum with her seventh-graders. “And eight out of ten times, I’m horrified at what they don’t know.”

What’s to be done? The news-literacy programs that are currently in their gestational phases are certainly a start. But such projects are limited in their reach. The numbers in question—the approximately 650 students reached by Alan Miller’s four-month pilot program, Howard Schneider’s three thousand students—are admirable; set against the vast backdrop of young Americans, though, their impact is negligible. To call the programs’ effect on young people’s civic sensibilities a drop in the bucket would be to overstate the matter.

The good news is that news literacy has the potential to transform itself from the cause of a committed few into a powerful national movement. But such a transformation will require its own brand of civic engagement: news outlets themselves will need to join the effort. “News organizations have a vital role to play in terms of educating kids,” says Vivian Schiller, CEO of National Public Radio and the chair of the News Literacy Project board. “The trick is how you do it. Because you can’t just beat them over the head and say, ‘Oh, you must read this newspaper, or you must listen to NPR.’ We need to reach them where they are.” And where they are is in the schools. And on the Web. “Young people don’t see digital news as a reformation or revolution,” notes Caesar Andrews, who until recently was the American Society of News Editors’ chair of audience development. “For them, it just is.”

The bottom line: news organizations need to make a point of seeking out young people—and of explaining to them what they do and, perhaps even more importantly, why they do it. News literacy offers news organizations the opportunity to essentially re-brand themselves. Rather than contort their content to a focus-grouped perception of audience desires, they can begin to help educate those audiences about the value of public-service journalism. Advocacy has its limits as far as journalism is concerned. But news literacy is a different kind of advocacy, and we need, as David Mindich says, “to allow journalists to be advocates for democracy.”

News Literacy v. Media Literacy

The news-literacy movement is in many ways an offshoot of the larger media-literacy movement, which focuses on the critical analysis of media messages to detect propaganda, censorship, and bias in those messages. Media literacy also focuses—and this is a big distinction between it and news literacy—on an appreciation of how the media’s structural features (funding models, consolidation, commercial concerns) affect the information ultimately presented to the public. “You can’t separate news literacy from advertising,” says Renee Hobbs, a professor at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia and a leading proponent of media literacy education. “It’s irresponsible to focus on the relations between reporters and sources and news value without positioning all of that in a larger context that has to do with increasing competition, the question of revenue streams, and the like.”

Yet such a commercial focus can tend to emphasize rhetorical caricatures—liberal/conservative bias, corporate stoogery, etc.—over close reading of news items themselves. The best journalism has always been a deeply flawed effort to piece together a thorough understanding of the world. The goal of a good journalist—even one who works for a large corporation—unlike that of a good advertising executive, is to get at the most complete truth of a matter as is humanly possible. And taken too far, a focus on the commercial elements of the media can encourage cynicism rather than skepticism; it can breed a blanket distrust of journalism, rather than a healthy suspicion of its extremes.

News literacy, instead, is fundamentally about distinguishing—and appreciating—excellence. It’s about telling students, says Alan Miller, “Here are the standards. Here’s the ideal. This is what sets quality journalism apart.” Teaching kids what makes good journalism and why good journalism matters, the thinking goes, will make them want to consume that journalism. “There needs to be an audience that recognizes good journalism,” says Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times-Union and education chair of the ASNE, “even when there’s no longer a reflexive trust in the vendors of journalism.” Underscoring that approach is the belief that excellence is self-reinforcing: quality will foster a large news audience—which, in turn, will foster more quality. “I used to read the Daily News or the Post,” says Raquel Monje, a high school senior who studied the NLP curriculum at Manhattan’s Facing History School this spring, referring to the city’s sometimes sensational tabloids. “Now I read The New York Times.”

The common ground uniting news literacy and its umbrella movement is their emphasis on the cultivation of savvy information consumers—and that shared mission is more urgent than ever. According to a recent study, fewer than a fifth of Americans say they can believe “all or most” media reporting—down from the already alarmingly low 27 percent that said the same five years ago. A large part of journalism’s crisis in credibility—which is of a piece with its crisis in authority—comes from the poor job journalism has done to distinguish itself from “the media” more broadly. “The problem is that you see journalism disappearing inside the larger world of communications,” the journalism scholar James Carey told Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach in The Elements of Journalism. “What you yearn to do is recover journalism from that larger world.”

Reclaiming the Narrative

Journalism and those who practice it are—let’s just say it—unpopular. Study after study confirms it. The extent to which journalists themselves are the victims or the cause is an open question, but the fact remains that our good name has been sullied since those halcyon post-Watergate years.

The news-literacy movement has the potential to begin to rewrite the unflattering narratives about the press that have become so pervasive that we’ve nearly stopped questioning them—to remove the derogatory undertone from the phrase “mainstream media.” It has the potential to push back against the hijacking of the journalistic reputation—not only by a sustained and strategic smear campaign on the part of the political right (“the liberal media”), but also on the part of the political left (“the corporate media”).

Such rehabilitation is necessary, in part, because the journalistic establishment as a whole, whether out of naïveté or complacency or both, has largely failed to defend itself. “While all those voices shouting from the left and right kept complaining about professional journalism,” says Ellen Hume, research director of mit’s Center for Future Civic Media, “nobody within journalism has been shouting back. I hear journalists talking to each other, wringing their hands, feeling unloved—but saying, ‘We’re not the story.’”

Part of the problem, as Hume suggests, is journalism’s longstanding reluctance against advocacy. But part of it, too, is journalists’ assumption of the self-evidence of their own civic significance: that the people shall know, and all that. Newspeople often forget how little the public appreciates, in every sense of the word, the press’s role in democracy. A 2005 Knight Foundation report, which surveyed 112,000 students at public and private high schools nationwide, found a marked ignorance of—and, worse, apathy toward—the rights afforded by the First Amendment. Three-quarters of those surveyed thought flag-burning was illegal; half believed the government has the power to censor the Internet; and more than a third thought the First Amendment takes too many liberties, as it were, in its provisions of free expression. To teach news literacy is at once to highlight and fill a void in the journalistic reputation. As Nick Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, put it in a recent commencement address, “I spend a lot of my time these days talking to nonjournalists about journalism, and I can tell you that we all have to learn to make a more sophisticated argument for ourselves.”

If we can do that successfully, we might just foster the flip side of our audience’s respect: a respect for our audience. What if what audiences need is also what they want? The notion is not without precedent. A 2000 study of viewer trends in local TV news, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded exactly that: that excellence, on top of everything else, makes good business sense. “Quality is the best way to retain or increase lead-in audience,” the study asserted. And for that matter, “the surest way to lose lead-in audience is to trick up newscasts with easy gimmicks—eye candy, ratings stunts, and hype.”

And that’s not true merely of TV news. “Over the long term, the history of news economics favors quality,” Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ’s director, points out. In the 1950s, he says, “People didn’t know that it was going to be The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer that were going to survive over the next fifty years.” Rather, many expected that it would be the tabloids—the papers with lower quality but larger readerships—that would be the future of news.

At a recent screening of the news documentary East Harlem IS—produced by students at the Citizen Schools after-school program in New York City, in partnership with the News Literacy Project and produced under the direction of The New York Times’s Jane Bornemeier—Amy Perrette, a Citizen Schools board member, noted, “It’s amazing what students can achieve when they’re held to high expectations.” And that goes for journalism’s audience, as well. As David Mindich puts it, “There’s a part of everybody that wants to be elevated, that wants to be challenged.” Excellent journalism, he notes, appeals “to the better angels of our being.” And it makes us want more of it.

(Re)building the Audience

In spring 2005, the Carnegie Corporation commissioned a report, “Abandoning the News,” which examined the impact of declining resources in American newsrooms. The problem wasn’t just one of resources—the supply side of news—the report’s author, Merrill Brown, concluded. It was also one of demand. “The future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.” The media critic Dan Kennedy put it a bit more bluntly in a recent Guardian column: “If journalists don’t succeed at expanding the community of people who are interested and take part in civic life, then they are facing what will prove to be a hopeless battle.”

News organizations must start treating audience cultivation with a sense of urgency. Not merely as a matter of business—though that’s certainly part of the equation—but also as a matter of democratic duty. “My thinking on this has really evolved from being, ‘Hey, wow, this is really a great thing for building audience for the Times-Union,’” says Rex Smith, “to thinking that this is a way to sustain journalism for our democracy.” While tough times tend to breed short-term solutions, the survival of news organizations depends on the size of their audience nest egg. “That long-term planning—that long-term planting—is something that’s been lacking,” Mindich says. But “we have to see ourselves as part of the democratic process.”

The problem isn’t merely one of “citizenship,” that vague yet powerful concept. The problem is also one of our relationship to truth itself. Call it the True Enough syndrome: as Farhad Manjoo put it in his 2008 book, “The limitless choice we now enjoy over the information we get about our world has loosened our grip on what is—and isn’t—true.” The threat that slack suggests is no less urgent for its Orwellian undertones: the fomentation, in Manjoo’s phrase, of “a post-fact society.” And of a media environment in which facts are increasingly assumed to be customizable—even optional. Think of cable punditry, where facts are so often fungible. Or that, according to a 2006 National Geographic poll, only 14 percent of Americans believe in evolution. Or that “swift boat” is now a verb. All that notwithstanding, truth isn’t an opt-in/opt-out notion.

Which is much more than post-postmodernist balderdash. Citizenship relies on communally accepted modes of taking in and talking about the world—on a shared vernacular that is premised on a shared reality. (“There is a necessary connection between public associations and newspapers,” de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America; “newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.”) Indeed, “shared” is a key aspect of news; vital to the oft-discussed relationship between information and democracy is information’s communality—which is to say, its authority. When we can’t agree on what the facts mean, what we have is vibrant debate; when we can’t agree on what the facts are, what we have is cognitive anarchy. When James Madison declared that “a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives,” we can safely assume that “knowledge,” to him, was an empirical entity, not a cherry-picked cocktail of subjective “truths.”

And yet. We are nearing a point—if, indeed, we’re not already there—in which knowledge itself is becoming appropriated by the glibness of subjectivity. The Web’s erosion of the storied “gatekeeper” function of the press, while it deserves celebration in so many senses, also creates a real danger for our democracy: through it, we now have nearly as many versions of truth—textual, historical truth—as we have news stories. Without a shared frame of reference—without the communal authority on which the power of the press has been predicated—we lose our bearings, stuck in the webs of our own comfort zones. While news will, of course, always have a subjective element to it—the very question of “What is news?”, the sociologist Herbert Gans points out, is not merely definitional, but moral and political—we cannot allow news’s humanity to overshadow its authenticity. News is neither sacred nor infallible; that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

It is only mildly melodramatic, then, to suggest that news literacy is an attempt to reclaim reality itself. Programs like the Stony Brook course and the News Literacy Project, paradoxically, validate the news precisely through the skepticism of it they aim to foster. Though their curricula examine varied platforms for information—newspapers, TV, radio, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the like—they still subscribe to “the news” as a singular cultural agent, definable and therefore manageable. They serve as a sieve of sensibility that can help us filter through the split-second news cycle and the journalism it produces—“churnalism,” the British journalist Nick Davies calls it—and counteract the vagaries of information overload. The news-literacy approach, in its simple but rather profound focus on “knowing what to believe,” fights against the choose-your-own-adventure approach to reality: it attempts to make quality journalism a normalizing—which is to say, connective—force in a world that is increasingly fast, furious, and fragmented. The varying news literacy programs and projects out there are contemporary responses to the declaration made by Walter Lippmann in 1920: for communities that lack the information to distinguish between fact and fiction, “there can be no liberty.”

The Sitting Duck and the Missionary

The question that hangs over the various news-literacy programs is the same question that always hangs over such ventures: Can the results match the rhetoric? Similar efforts have, after all, failed to inspire a new wave of savvy newspaper readers. In the eighties, newspaper-in-the-classroom programs were widespread. High schools regularly offered journalism classes that taught, essentially, news literacy as they taught other journalistic skills.

But one benefit of crisis is its corollary of creativity: now more than ever, journalism has a marked opportunity to reinvent itself and its role in the community. “Tear up the current models that perceive journalism as a craft,” declares Nieman Foundation curator Bob Giles. “Rethink the field as one of rigorous scholarship and practice. And build anew around one truth: journalism matters. Give students that, and they will find their way.”

And—who knows?—they might just find their way to journalism. In his autobiography, A Reporter’s Life, Walter Cronkite observes that “life and the course we take through it are affected by many circumstances.” He is “inclined to think in those lofty terms,” the newsman notes,

when I think of those events that followed upon meeting Fred Birney, a rather slight man of unprepossessing mien who, despite his glasses, always wore a frown, as if he were looking for something beyond his range of sight. He was an inspired teacher who directed the course of my life. He wasn’t even a professional teacher, but he had the gift.



Fred Birney was a newspaperman who thought that high schools ought to have courses in journalism. That was a highly innovative idea at the time, but by presenting himself as an unpaid volunteer and the program as a virtual no-cost item, he convinced the Houston school board. He spent a couple days each week circulating among Houston’s five high schools preaching the fundamentals of a craft he loved…. I was a sitting duck for Fred Birney, missionary from the Fourth Estate.

By Megan Garber 

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Teacher Magazine:  News You Can Use

A media literacy initiative aims to connect students with professional journalists

The average student is exposed to an enormous quantity of both good and bad information every day via Web sites, blogs, online news, television, radio, and even, on occasion, print media. At the same time, the journalism profession is in a state of crisis, facing declining readership and falling ad sales. Former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Alan C. Miller hopes his News Literacy Project will have a positive impact on both problems.

Miller got the idea for the project in the spring of 2006 after giving a presentation on journalism to his daughter’s 6th grade class. The teacher and students’ enthusiastic response to the presentation prompted Miller to consider the wider impact he could have on young peoples’ news literacy.

“I had a growing concern about the state of the [news] industry. I had a growing concern about dropping readership,” said Miller. “I started thinking, maybe journalists could use their expertise to connect with the students like I had.”

Teacher Colin O’Brien talks about the NLPThe News Literacy Project aims to teach middle and high school students to distinguish between news, analysis, and opinion in order to be smarter media consumers and, in turn, become more engaged citizens. Active and retired journalists from major news organizations are volunteering their time to make presentations to students and work in conjunction with teachers in social studies, history, and English classrooms. Participating teachers and journalists use original curriculum materials developed by NLP’s Curriculum Developer, Bob Jervis, a former school social studies coordinator, in collaboration with Miller.

The NLP has gained support of prominent print and television news outlets such as The New York Times, ABC News, 60 Minutes, The Washington Post, and CNN. More than 75 journalists, from those organizations and more, have volunteered their time to assist with the project.

Getting the News

The NLP pilot program launched at Walt Whitman High school in Bethesda, Md., on February 26. It’s also running at a high school in Manhattan and middle school in Brooklyn. The launch at Walt Whitman High featured a school-wide assembly with an introduction by Miller and speeches by Time magazine political analyst Mark Halperin and ABC News senior Justice Department correspondent Pierre Thomas. The journalists discussed the importance of reading news to stay informed as citizens, of distinguishing news from opinion, and the need to create younger news consumers to save their industry from the financial collapse it’s currently facing.

Halperin summed up one of the big problems news consumers face today to the assembled students and teachers.

“The good news is, because of technology, news is so democratic. Anyone in this room with access to a computer can participate,” he said. “The bad news is that tons of access leads to less accurate information and makes it harder to tell good journalism from bad.”

Halperin also discussed the significance of journalism in a democratic society. The accurate reporting and information quality news outlets provide helps readers make more informed decisions as citizens.

“The idea is to get you to appreciate not just the importance of accurate news and information, but also the entertainment of it, the value of it to enrich your lives and to enrich you as citizens, to be more valuable and better informed,” said Halperin.

During his time at the lectern, Thomas gave more in-depth anecdotes about reporting after 9/11 and reporting on Washington Mutual’s corrupt financial practices to illustrate the lengths good journalists will go to do the story right.

“At its best journalism is public service, about serving and informing the public,” Thomas said, referring to how, following 9/11, he worked to be accurate in his reporting by using only his most trusted sources and fact checking everything before it was broadcast.

Thomas spoke about the deep pride and emotions he felt, about fighting back tears as he reported on 9/11.

“I don’t think we’ve done a great job of making people understand what goes into the job, and how we feel about the job, and the professionalism we try to have,” he said. “That’s why I think this program, that Alan has embarked on, is so, so critical.”

Reporters in the Classroom

The journalist-led classroom sessions began at Whitman one week later, on March 5, with journalists from USA Today and The New York Times. According to Miller, the journalists meet with members of the NLP in advance, and if possible, the classroom teacher, to discuss what material to cover with the students, how to present it, and examine the NLP curriculum materials.

“We distinguish ourselves from the career day presenters,” said Miller. “A lesson that comes out of this pilot is that the more coordination there was, the more successful it was.”

Tom Frank, USA Today homeland security reporter, led two morning class periods of 10th grade AP government. Frank used an anecdote about covering the 2006 West Virginia mining accident at the Sago mine that left 12 miners dead. He bounced ideas off the students, pretending that he was their editor and they were his staff.

“If you were writing this story, how would you get beyond the human interest story?” Mr. Frank asked the students. “How do you raise bigger questions?”

Frank explained how he used mine-safety inspection documents to carve out a bigger story about lax safety standards at the mines and lax inspection standards. The anecdote was meant to illustrate how to distinguish trustworthy sources in journalism.

“I don’t trust people. People can lie,” Frank said. “I trust documents.”

New York Times Washington bureau terrorism and national security reporter Eric Schmitt took a similar approach with the AP U.S. Government students he spoke to. Schmitt used exciting anecdotes from his career as a reporter to illustrate what goes on behind-the-scenes of a newspaper article and why certain stories are deemed important. He had just returned from Pakistan where he reported on a secret U.S. task force that was training Pakistani police and military.

Explaining why it’s important for U.S. citizens to know about a secret task force, he said, “The US has a history of small military involvement that ends up growing very large. Vietnam started small and got out of hand, as history has shown.” Schmitt has done extensive reporting on the Iraq war. He used stories about breaking the news of George W. Bush’s war plans, reporting his first hand experience from the “spider hole” Saddam Hussein was captured in, and being involved in a highway chase in Iraq worthy of a James Bond film.

“I thought it was a really great session in the sense that the students had good provocative questions,” said Schmitt after his teaching session. “They’d obviously been thinking through some of the same issues and dilemmas, issues like how credible our sources are, how do you corroborate information coming from different sources?”

Colin O’Brien, the AP Government teacher whose class Frank presented to, was enthusiastic about the impact of the program.

“The journalists really reinforced the importance of news literacy, shared interesting stories,” O’Brien wrote in an e-mail. “Student feedback has been very positive, and it’s a program I’m looking forward to next year.”

Going National

Miller hopes to eventually expand the NLP into a program with national reach, either in its current form or through new media and videos for in-class use in communities with less access to the wealth of journalists that cities like Washington and New York have.

“We’re working on the business model right now, looking at ways of having a wide-reach throughout the country,” he said. “We very much want to use new media, the Internet, and video to take advantage of the rich classroom portion and reach wider areas.”

by Josh Cohen

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News Literacy Project Video: Check It Out

This video reflects the News Literacy Project’s first month in middle school and high school classrooms in New York City and Bethesda, Md.

It was produced by the project’s staff in collaboration with volunteer participants from The New York Times, “60 Minutes,” National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times. It includes an original song written and performed by Bob Baker, “Check It Out!”

For more information about the project, go to www.thenewsliteracyproject.org.
It was produced by the project’s staff in collaboration with volunteer participants from The New York Times, “60 Minutes,” National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times. It includes an original song, “Check It Out!” written and performed by Bob Baker.

Remarks by Alan C. Miller, Executive Director of the News Literacy Project, at Stony Brook

March 12, 2009

Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be with such a distinguished group focused on this exciting, emerging field.

Kathy Kiely of USA Today told students participating in our project last week: “People who are citizens in an information age have got to learn how to be journalists.”

I began the News Literacy Project with two primary goals: to light a spark of interest in information that has a public purpose, and to give middle and high school students the tools to separate fact from fiction — enabling them to seek and prize unvarnished truth in whatever medium and on whatever platform they find it.

Our intent is to use the tools of journalism to get students to think more critically about the world around them and to become better-informed citizens.

With the support of the Knight and Ford Foundations, we’ve begun to achieve these goals by creating a new model that brings together journalists with history, government and English teachers to create mini-units in news literacy.

We have now enrolled more than 100 active and retired journalists as volunteer fellows. They include winners of journalism’s highest honors, book authors and network television correspondents. Many work for our initial participating news organizations: The New York Times, ABC News, USA Today, “60 Minutes,” The Washington Post, CNN and now NPR. We’re proud to have the Poynter Institute as our partner and fiscal agent as well.

We’ve developed an innovative curriculum that helps teachers prepare students for the journalists’ visits and the journalists prepare for their presentations.

The curriculum is designed around what we call our four pillars:

• Why does news matter?
• Why is the First Amendment protection of free speech so vital to American democracy?
• How can students know what to believe?
• What challenges and opportunities do the internet and digital media create?

We give the teachers our materials in these binders, which we are continually revising and expanding. I invite all of you to take a look.

We start with a detailed set of essential questions, which you see on either side of me. We give each of our partner teachers a set to display in the classroom, as well as definitions of basic journalism terms and copies of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism.

We ask teachers to devote six to 10 classroom sessions to the project — divided between classes used to prepare students for the journalists’ visits and the journalists’ presentations. We tell teachers we can help them meet state and federal standards. And we select journalists for specific classes based on the subject area and students’ needs.

Before the units, we hold orientation and training meetings with teachers and journalists.

We then provide the teachers with examples of the journalists’ work to share in advance — so students start consuming quality journalism and are ready to ask questions. We give the journalists our menu of 20 activities and ask them to brainstorm with our local coordinator and consult with the teacher.

We discourage the journalists from just telling war stories or lecturing. We want them to engage with students. We ask them to leave at least 10 minutes for Q&A. And we arrange for some to do multimedia presentations.

A project staffer attends each journalist’s classroom visit to coordinate, monitor and provide feedback. We’re a long way from career day-type appearances.

We find other ways to insinuate ourselves into a school’s DNA. We have copies of The New York Times delivered to a New York school and The Washington Post in Maryland. In one of our schools, journalist advisors will help start the first student newspaper.

We launched our initial pilot in a middle school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just six weeks ago. We’ve also started in a high school on the West Side of Manhattan. And we’ve been in a suburban high school in Bethesda, Md., the past two weeks. During a three-day span, we had 11 top journalists present to 19 sections of AP government classes and more than 250 students there.

We even have our own anthem: A former Los Angeles Times colleague wrote a news literacy song for us based on the journalistic axiom “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” We’ve built it into our curriculum and instructed teachers to ask students to do their own song, rap, video, essay or cartoon reflecting what they learned in the project. Students also receive their own graduation “Check it out” button.

In our first weeks, the teachers have embraced the project, the journalists have been superb and the impact has been evident. I’d like to share a few early highlights:

• The sight of 150 or so middle school students excitedly waving their hands to ask Soledad O’Brien questions during our kickoff event in Brooklyn;
• High school students in Bethesda gasping when former LA Times foreign correspondent Tyler Marshall held up pieces of the Berlin Wall that he collected when he covered its fall;
• Teachers and journalists engaging students in our activity on viral e-mail hoaxes about the Holocaust and Barack Obama and turning the students on to such myth-busting websites as Factcheck.org.

After her initial class last week with “60 Minutes” producers, a New York teacher wrote:

“The students were incredibly energized and inspired by the two journalists. The feedback I got was that they really enjoyed not only the presentation but the helpful ideas, suggestions and research tips. What an amazing start to this partnership!”

We’re also partnering with Citizen Schools, a national model, in an after-school apprenticeship program in East Harlem. Five New York Times journalists and a former CNN financial editor are teaching middle school students about journalism and news literacy and helping them produce a mini-documentary exploring changes in their neighborhood.

Eventually, we intend to use new media platforms to share our curriculum and classroom experience to achieve wide national reach. And we welcome the prospect of partnering with journalism schools, too — hopefully, including some of you.

The video you’re about to see is an example of how we can reach out. It’s a coast-to-coast collaboration tapping volunteers from The New York Times and “60 Minutes” to shoot and edit, NPR to narrate, the Los Angeles Times for graphics and music, and ABC News for video footage.

In their efforts to hold on to their often-shrinking audiences, news organizations have tended to focus on the supply side. Our focus is on the demand side of the next generation.

With that, I’d like to show you the News Literacy Project in action. (Video begins.)

James Rainey:  Write Away, Student Journalists

There’s hope for high school papers, especially with the new state law that protects teachers.

Not so long ago, a journalism foundation surveyed American high school students and found about half believed the government could legally censor the Internet. Three-quarters expressed ambivalence toward the 1st Amendment. More than a third said it went too far in guaranteeing our most basic rights.

What’s afoot in the land of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson? We’d like to be nurturing the next Edward R. Murrow, but it sounds like we’ve got a bunch of kids auditioning to be Robert Mugabe’s information minister. Frightening.

Some of us were lucky to be soaked in the values of free speech and a free press when we were young. It happened at the high school paper, where we wrote not only about bad cafeteria food and sewer sliding, but the evils of apartheid and the need to integrate our student government.

High school journalism has suffered some blows in the three decades since I was editor of the Samohi.

When schools cut electives, some papers disappeared. There’s less money, so many publish once a month or less, instead of weekly, as we did at Santa Monica High School.

The sheen of those post-Watergate days has faded too, so fewer young people seek the thrill of sitting down with the principal or superintendent and demanding answers: Why can’t we have more Advanced Placement classes? Do you really think you can pacify the students by emptying the vending machines of Mountain Dew?

This could all be pretty dispiriting, but a couple of recent developments give me hope that student newspapers will continue to cajole, inspire and have a little fun along the way.

A new state law, taking effect with the new year, prohibits administrators from retaliating against advisors who try to protect student press freedom. And a nonprofit has spelled out plans to help students distinguish fact from the furious fulminations that, more and more often, pose as news.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) sponsored the Journalism Teacher Protection Act because too many school principals retaliate against energized journalism students by exiling their best teachers to driver’s ed or freshman English.

Accounts of such puny, punitive actions are legion.

Administrators at South East High School in South Gate booted journalism advisor Darryl Adams a couple of years ago after he supported a student whose editorial contended that random drugs and weapons searches were conducted unevenly.

The bosses at Rialto High School told Rick Whited his student journalists were “too negative,” pushing him out as advisor even after he offered the creative compromise of teaching a separate class in public relations.

Janet Ewell’s crime at Rancho Alamitos High School in Garden Grove? Letting her students write about filthy bathrooms, bad cafeteria food and teachers who did not make enough time to help students. She got the boot in 2002.

(Administrators overseeing those teachers either could not be reached or declined to comment.)

Those supporting the Yee legislation compiled 15 stories about high school journalism advisors being pushed aside. Doubtless many others have not come forward for fear of being reassigned, or worse.

Charismatic teachers often get replaced by someone with less verve or experience and almost certainly less stomach for pushing student rights.

I’d like to think administrators only crack down when students write something truly disruptive. But in nearly three decades of newspapering, I’ve dealt with too many principals and superintendents who tend toward the officious and hidebound. (Why are they always the ones who, armed with featherweight PhDs, insist on being called “Doctor”?)

Ewell said she has seen poor rural and urban schools, typically with large immigrant populations, frequently lose out when journalism is cut back.

“And they are kids who most need to come to understand 1st Amendment freedoms,” Ewell said, “to understand they can have a voice.”

Since the principal pushed Adams out as advisor to South East High’s Jaguar Times—where the students are the sons and daughters of working-class Latinos—journalism enrollment has dropped to about a quarter of what it once was. After changing to another new advisor, Rialto High has not printed a paper this school year.

The founder of the News Literacy Project thinks the explosion of news on the Internet makes this a time when students need more, not less, understanding of how to find the truth.

Beginning next month with pilot efforts in New York and Maryland, the project will send professional journalists to teach middle and high school students how to “distinguish verified information from raw messages, spin, gossip and opinion,” said Alan Miller, a former L.A. Times reporter who conceived the project.

Amen. Maybe when it spreads the curriculum around the country (as planned), it will begin to put a dent in those e-mails I keep getting from those happy dunderheads who just know something is true because “it’s all over the blogs.”

Then, if we can get a few more kids in journalism classes, their teachers protected from censorship by The Man, we might see more high schoolers agreeing that old 1st Amendment is pretty cool after all.

James Rainey
January 11, 2009
james.rainey@latimes.com

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Encore Journey: Investigative Reporter to Civic Educator

Alan Miller was an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and won his profession’s highest honor, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on the shoddy performance of the Marine Corps’ Harrier attack jet.

But the turmoil at some of the nation’s biggest newspapers has caused even some of the industry’s best and brightest to question their future in the business, and to fear for for the quality of civic life if solid journalistic reporting and investigation withers.

Miller went to his daughter’s middle school in Bethesda, Md., to talk to 175 sixth graders about why journalism matters. The thank you notes he received indicated he had connected, and suggested a new way to make a difference.

Miller left the newspaper earlier this year and founded the News Literacy Project, an effort to mobilize professional journalists “to help secondary school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.” The project’s Web site went live this week and pilot projects in schools in New York City and Montgomery County, Md., are planned for early next year.

The project will match active and retired journalists and teachers of English, social studies and history, as well as after-school media clubs. The journalists and teachers will help young people understand why news matters to them and what the First Amendment and a free media mean in a democracy. Most importantly, they will teach students how to assess the credibility of what they read, see and hear.

Social studies teachers, for example, might seek a political reporter, while a class exploring Latin America could request a foreign correspondent. Journalists will be able to address classes through videoconferencing as well as in person. More than 30 prominent journalists have already volunteered, and the project plans to recruit hundreds more.

Despite the explosion of information and the availability of “content,” surveys show young people are increasingly uninterested in information that bears on civic life. The News Literacy Project aims to teach students how to distinguish verified information from raw messages, spin, gossip and opinion.

The project’s board of directors includes Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, John Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, Soledad O’Brien, CNN anchor and special correspondent, Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, and Neil Budde, president of DailyMe.com. Also on the board is John Gomperts, president of Civic Ventures, publisher of Encore.org.

by David Bank

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No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle

In their new book, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Howard Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former television critic at the Los Angeles Times, and co-author Charles S. Feldman say that news literacy should be taught beginning in elementary school. 

They describe the News Literacy Project as an ambitious program “that Alan Miller, formerly with the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, began plotting in 2008 with a mind toward organizing a volunteer network of journalists who would visit middle and high school classrooms and turn the business inside out for students. It’s a highly worthy concept and welcome approach to have pre-college students get the word from those who have actually walked the walk. Good idea, great idea.”

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Journalism And That Whole ‘Citizenship’ Thing

By Brent Cunningham

Teaching the next generation of news consumers how to discern quality news and information from the dreck and, more importantly, why the distinction matters, is something that anyone who is serious about sustaining good journalism should support. That is precisely what the nascent news literacy movement, born in Howie Schneider’s Stony Brook lab, aims to do, and the effort takes another giant step forward today with the launch of The News Literacy Project, Alan Miller’s national project that will bring retired journalists into the classroom to give middle and high school students the tools to be smarter and more frequent consumers and creators of credible information across all media and platforms. Students will be taught how to distinguish verified information from raw messages, spin, gossip and opinion and encouraged to seek information that will make them well-informed citizens and voters.

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Global News Literacy Roundtable Discussion on C-SPAN

Participants in a roundtable discussion, including Alan C. Miller, the News Literacy Project’s executive director, focused on the importance of media literacy in creating an informed citizenry. Topics included discerning the reliability of information, programs designed to improve consumer uses of news, and teaching media literacy in developing countries as well as the United States. The May 27, 2008 event, sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance, was broadcast by C-Span.

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National Endowment for Democracy

“Under the guidance of active and retired journalists working in schools, the students will learn about news sources and reliability, among other topics. This type of effort is needed worldwide as an important component of developing an informed citizenry who demands independent and honest reporting.”

— Report by the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance, Feb. 5, 2008

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FishbowlLA

“It’s a rare reporter who leaves daily news to try to make journalism a better institution.”

— FishbowlLA on the decision by Alan C. Miller, the News Literacy Project’s executive director, to leave the Los Angeles Times in March 2008 to create the project

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