GSAN: Special issue: Links you loved

Your guide to the
week in news literacy

May 21, 2024

Special issue: Links you loved

Hello friend of NLP,

We’ve got a special newsletter for you today — a roundup of the most popular stories and resources in Get Smart About News from this school year. We hope you enjoy looking back.

📣 We’d love to hear your feedback on this newsletter. Please share your thoughts in this year’s reader survey. It takes just a few minutes, and at the end you can enter a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card.🙂 The winner will be drawn on June 5.

Get Smart About News is taking a break and will return in June in its summer format. We look forward to being back in your inbox soon!

— The Get Smart About News team

Top ~~picks~~ clicks

These stories were among the most clicked news links in Get Smart About News this school year:

Last week’s issue on the Pulitzer Prizes included a Nieman Lab article about a major shift in journalism — more online-native outlets were honored with the award than newspapers (May 14 issue).

Can you tell the difference between AI images and real photos? It can be challenging! The AI images in this piece look like prizewinning photos (Dec. 5 issue).

Investigative reporter Jordan Green shared his firsthand account of neo-Nazis who harassed and stalked him while he reported on their extremism and violence (Feb. 27 issue).

A student made an AI version of journalist Anderson Cooper that looks and sounds just like him. Can you spot the difference in this CNN video? (Dec. 5 issue).

This 60 Minutes segment covers how prebunking, or “psychological inoculation,” helps people understand how misinformation works in order to identify and protect themselves from it (April 2 issue).

The number of “pink slime” sites — low-quality sites often funded by partisan sources — is nearly the same as the number of local news publications in the U.S. (April 9 issue).

Most popular resources

These recommended NLP resources were among the most clicked in Get Smart About News over the course of this school year.

Quizzes! In case you missed it, we had an AI quiz and a misinformation quiz. Both were featured in special issues of Get Smart About News and ranked at the top of newsletter resources.

Our most popular infographic was “6 things to know about AI,” which provides concise news literacy takeaways to keep in mind as AI technology continues to evolve. Also highly ranked were NLP’s “Breaking news checklist” and “In brief: News media bias” infographics.

This NLP TikTok video about Sora, a text-to-video generative AI tool first teased in February, shows examples of how Sora works — including an AI video of puppies playing in the snow — and explains why it makes media literacy infinitely more important. (This video can also be viewed on Instagram.)

Are we missing a resource? Let us know in our reader survey. ⬇️

News Goggles

Public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act play a crucial role in watchdog reporting. Learn how Theo Scheer and Alex Walters, students at Michigan State University, used FOIAs to report on their school in this TikTok video. (The video can also be viewed on Instagram and YouTube Shorts.)

Student journalists Theo Scheer and Alex Walters, who work on The State News newspaper at Michigan State University, are side-by-side with their newsroom in the background.

A banner ad for the documentary film Trusted Sources with a close-up image of someone in a suit beside two news reporters. One reporter’s hand holds a news microphone and the other reporter’s hand is taking notes with a pen and paper. Descriptive text says: “Finding trustworthy news in a sea of deception” and “A new documentary shows how to distinguish between professional journalism and agenda-driven content disguised as news.” The ad includes a link to trustdocfilm.com for viewers to learn more.

Need more for your summer reading list?

Be sure to check out some of these news literacy-related pieces!

On misinformation

Video: “Young voters are worse at identifying misinformation, study shows” (Morgan Radford, NBC News).
“BBC journalist in Nigeria shares how she navigates election disinformation” (Catharine Richert, MPR News).
“Disinformation creates ‘precarious year for democracy,’ experts warn” (Nikki Wentling, Military Times).
“New tool empowers users to fight online misinformation” (Adam Zewe, MIT News).

On artificial intelligence

“Google Is About to Change Everything—and Hopes You Won’t Find Out” (Nitish Pahwa, Slate).
“Newspaper conglomerate Gannett is adding AI-generated summaries to the top of its articles” (Mia Sato, The Verge).
“We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem” (Alex Cranz, The Verge).
Podcast: “Amazon’s garbage book factory” (Today, Explained, Vox).

On social media

“A professor is suing Facebook over its recommendation algorithms” (Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review).
“How influencers and content creators discuss birth control on social media: What research shows” (Naseem S. Miller, The Journalist’s Resource).

Love this newsletter? Please take a moment to forward it to your friends, or they can subscribe here.

Thanks for reading!

Your weekly issue of Get Smart About News is created by Susan Minichiello (@susanmini), Dan Evon (@danieljevon), Peter Adams (@PeterD_Adams), Hannah Covington (@HannahCov) and Pamela Brunskill (@PamelaBrunskill). It is edited by Mary Kane (@marykkane) and Lourdes Venard (@lourdesvenard).

Sign up to receive NLP Connections (news about our work) or switch your subscription to the educator version of Get Smart About News called The Sift^® here.

Check out NLP's Checkology virtual classroom, where you can learn to better navigate today’s information landscape by developing news literacy skills.