GSAN: Special issue: Links you loved

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. ⬇️

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).