Teach news literacy this week Pulitzer Prize winners | AI chatbot friends
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The Pulitzer Prizes are announced annually and celebrate the best of American journalism.
The Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honor in American journalism, were awarded last week. For the first time in the prize’s history, more online news outlets were honored than newspapers.
Lookout Santa Cruz, a four-year-old online publication in Santa Cruz, California, won a Pulitzer in the breaking news category for “its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage” of catastrophic flooding and mudslides, according to prize administrator Marjorie Miller. And a small Chicago-based nonprofit news site, the Invisible Institute, won two Pulitzers for its work on criminal justice and policing. One of its prizes, in local reporting, was shared with City Bureau, another nonprofit newsroom, for a two-year investigation of how Chicago police handle cases of missing Black women and girls.
In the public service category — considered the most prestigious — ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom, won for its impactful reporting on how a small group of billionaires wooed U.S. Supreme Court justices. The coverage led “the Court to adopt its first code of conduct,” according to the Pulitzer Prize website. The list of honorees included The New York Times, The New Yorker, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press.
Local news outlets face several challenges today, including declining revenue — but most American adults (66%) say they still follow local news closely, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. However, the survey also found that most adults (63%) think their local news outlets are doing “very well or somewhat well” financially, despite widespread revenue concerns, staff cuts and closures at local news outlets across the country.
Another disruptive trend in journalism is generative AI technology. A new report by the Local News Initiative examines whether AI will help or hurt the local news industry. While AI expands possibilities in storytelling, it also introduces errors, lacks ethical guidelines and accelerates the spread of misinformation. Ultimately, every newsroom needs a strategy and guidelines for AI usage, the report concludes.
Discuss: What distinguishes local news from other types of news? What impact does local news have on communities? What role do local news outlets play in a healthy democracy? What do we lose when we lose sources of local news? How can communities support local news outlets? Has AI impacted local news sources in your area?
Idea: Use NLP’s Newsroom to Classroom program to invite a journalist to your classroom to discuss the importance of local news.
TikTok says it will begin to automatically label AI-generated videos in the coming months using a third-party service that attaches metadata to AI-generated content. The move is an effort to combat misinformation on the video-sharing social media app ahead of this year’s presidential election in the U.S., although it’s not clear yet how effective the technology will be at catching synthetic images, video and audio. Other efforts from tech companies include watermarking AI content and partnerships with media and digital literacy organizations.
Discuss: Do you think TikTok’s new AI labeling policy will help curb misinformation? Why or why not? What makes some pieces of misinformation go viral on social media? What role can you play in pushing back against misinformation online?
NO: Neither U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican, nor Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the moon is more useful than the sun.
YES: This quote is an iteration of a phrase that has been circulating since the 1800s and has repeatedly been used to mock nonscientific opinions and the people who espouse them.
NewsLit takeaway: False claims can easily slip by undetected when they affirm a previously held opinion. If we believe that certain politicians are unintelligent, for example, we are more prone to believe rumors that paint those politicians in that light. When a false claim employs humor, it can catch us off guard and make these claims more appealing. In this case, the quote appeals to opinions about controversial figures on both sides of the political aisle. If a piece of misinformation elicits the feeling that it might as well be true, it’s a good idea to take a moment, reevaluate viewpoints and make sure they are based on facts — not jokes.
NO: This is not a genuine photograph of Katy Perry at the 2024 fundraising gala for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City.
NO: While Perry has attended the Met Gala in previous years, she was not in attendance at the 2024 event.
NewsLit takeaway: It’s always been important to get information from trusted sources, but it’s even more crucial now because of artificial intelligence technologies that allow photorealistic images to be quickly and easily created. This image of Katy Perry, for example, wasn’t shared by the expected credible sources — such as entertainment publications, photography agencies or social media accounts of the celebrities at the Met Gala — but instead went viral after it was posted on X.
Realistic-looking imagery wasn’t the only aspect that made it seem believable. It was shared as an influx of genuine photographs of celebrities at the Met Gala were also circulating online. This is a common tactic to spread false information. Even Katy Perry’s own mother believed the image was genuine, according to a text exchange the singer shared on Instagram.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. is still uncertain after a new law passed requiring the app be sold or face a nationwide ban. The app and its parent company are suing the U.S., saying a ban would violate the First Amendment.
Israel ordered Arab news network Al Jazeera to shut down its operations in the country for at least 45 days, citing security concerns. The U.S. State Department released a statement disagreeing with the decision.
Google is introducing AI-generated answers in search results — displacing links to human-written websites and sometimes making up fake answers.
Could an AI chatbot be your friend or therapist? A tech columnist experimented with having 18 AI “friends” for a month and found it amusing, but not a great replacement for real human friendship.
Gun violence disinformation is circulating on the Chinese social media app WeChat, which is used by three-quarters of Chinese Americans, according to a new report.
Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan spent four years in prison after reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Although she was set to be released on May 13, it’s unclear what her status is.
When people are confused about what sources of news are accurate, they’re more likely to be news avoidant, according to a new University of Michigan study.
A Southern California school district with a large working-class Latino population is offering journalism courses and training for elementary, middle and high school students — providing students with a pathway for becoming journalists.
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