The News Literacy Project Kicks Off Fall Forum Speaker Series on September 12, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 2, 2010
Contact: Alan Miller, 301-651-7499
alanmiller@thenewsliteracyproject.org
NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth will be the featured speakers at the kickoff event for the News Literacy Project’s Fall Forum at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., at 7:30 pm on Sunday, Sept. 12.
Schiller and Weymouth will discuss “The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age.” Ray Suarez, a senior correspondent for “PBS NewsHour,” will be the moderator.
The event is the first in a series of three that the News Literacy Project is hosting at Walt Whitman, located at 7100 Whittier Boulevard. The Washington Post and BAE Systems are sponsoring the Fall Forum.
Gwen Ifill, moderator of “Washington Week” and a senior correspondent on “PBS NewsHour,” will address “Race and Politics in the Age of Obama” at 7:30 pm on Sunday, Oct. 17. Richard Wolffe, a political analyst with MSNBC, will moderate.
Michael McCurry, press secretary to President Bill Clinton, and Dana Perino, press secretary to President George W. Bush, will focus on “Briefing the Press: Former Democratic and Republican White House Press Secretaries Compare Notes” at 7:30 pm on Thursday, Nov. 4. Candy Crowley of CNN will moderate.
Schiller chairs the News Literacy Project’s board; Ifill is also a board member. The Washington Post, NPR, NBC News and CNN are among 17 news organizations that are participating.
The project is an innovative national educational program that mobilizes seasoned journalists to give students in middle schools and high schools the critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction in the digital age. It also seeks to give students an appreciation of the value of quality journalism.
Students are learning how to distinguish verified information from unfiltered messages, opinion, advertising and propaganda - whether they are using search engines to find websites with information about specific topics, assessing a viral email, watching television news or reading a newspaper. The project’s goal is to make them better students today and better-informed citizens tomorrow.
The project is embarking on its second full year in the classroom. It will be working with at least 25 English, government, history and humanities teachers to reach more than 1,700 students in at least 10 schools in New York City, Chicago and Bethesda. It is beginning its third year at Walt Whitman High School and is expanding to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda this year as well.
More than 160 journalists have enrolled as volunteers in NLP’s online directory. They include broadcast correspondents, authors of best-selling books and winners of journalism’s highest honors. Nearly half of them participated in the project’s classroom, extended day and after-school programs in the last school year.
The project has created a new model by forging partnerships among active and retired journalists, the project’s local coordinators and teachers. Journalist fellows and teachers are devising units focusing on the importance of news to young people, the role of the First Amendment and a free media in a democracy, and ways to discern reliable information.
Videos and a broadcast report that capture the project in action and showcase exemplary student work can be found on the project’s YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/NewsLiteracyProject.
The News Literacy Project is headed by founder Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times. In addition to Schiller and Ifill, the board includes Alison Bernstein, a former Ford Foundation vice president; Chuck Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, and Terry K. Peterson, who was counselor to Education Secretary Richard W. Riley in the Clinton administration.
The Ford, Knight and McCormick Foundations have been the project’s primary funders. The Poynter Center for Media Studies is the project’s partner and fiscal agent.
Schiller is the president and CEO of NPR. She joined NPR in January 2009 from The New York Times Co., where as senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com she led the daily operations of the largest newspaper website on the Internet. She previously served as senior vice president and general manager for the Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture of The New York Times and Discovery Communications, and senior vice president of CNN Productions, where she headed CNN’s long-form programming.
Weymouth is publisher of The Washington Post and chief executive officers of Washington Post Media. She joined The Washington Post in 1996 as assistant counsel, served as associate counsel for the online publishing subsidiary Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and returned to the newspaper in 2000. She
was vice president of advertising before being named to her current positions in 2008.
Suarez is a Washington-based senior correspondent for “PBS NewsHour” He came to the network’s nightly news program in October 1999 after six years as host of National Public Radio’s call-in news show “Talk of the Nation.” In addition to his work on “PBS NewsHour,” he hosts the monthly radio program “America Abroad” for Public Radio International and the weekly politics program “Destination Casa Blanca” for the Hispanic Information Telecommunications Network.
Tickets for the Fall Forum events can be purchased at www.thenewsliteracyproject.org or at the box office on the evening of the events. The price is $15 for adults and $10 for students. For further information, call 301-525-7500.
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