FY26 Annual Report: Surpassing goals, raising expectations
A letter from the News Literacy Project’s Board Chair Karen Wickre and CEO and President Chuck Salter
For the second year in a row, the News Literacy Project achieved record-breaking growth. We not only surpassed our fiscal year 2026 targets for the number of educators, districts and students reached, but we also exceeded our annual projections for the next two years of our strategic plan! Because of this success, we increased our direct impact targets through the end of fiscal year 2028, setting our sights even higher. Your commitment to our mission and support of our work was critical to our success. Thank you!
Students are living through a historic moment of transformation in news and information — one that will shape their futures. Debates over free speech and a free press have dominated news cycles. Headlines regularly reflect both dreams and opportunities, as well as fears and uncertainty sparked by AI. And viral misinformation continues to fill students’ feeds at an alarming rate.
Despite — and perhaps even because of these challenges — more educators, districts and states are prioritizing news literacy education, recognizing it as a solution for equipping students with the skills to think critically and independently, so they can make informed decisions in all areas of their lives. With nearly 20 years of experience, NLP remains the leading — indeed, the only — organization solely dedicated to providing news literacy instruction and ensuring its permanent place in education.
Our vision of every student in the United States being skilled in news literacy has never been more important, nor more in reach. NLP’s unprecedented growth is roof. Beyond surpassing our FY26 targets and reaching nearly 23,000 educators and more than 890,000 students, interest in our District Fellowship program continues to grow. This program empowers school district leaders, administrators and educators to design, pilot and implement sustainable, district-wide news and media literacy curricula. In the spring, we announced our fifth cohort, bringing the program to 44 districts in 16 states, ensuring more than 1.45 million student seats will be guaranteed news literacy instruction.
We also celebrated Utah becoming the fourth state to mandate news literacy teaching standards. Since we already work directly with more than 40% of the state’s school districts, we are well-positioned to help schools and educators ensure their curriculum meets state requirements. Lastly, thanks to your generosity, we broke another record this year by raising more than $10.5 million.
Building on this momentum, we began a discovery project in the fourth quarter of FY26 to help shape NLP’s next chapter and solidify our position as the leader in the field of news literacy education. We gathered insights from educators through surveys, focus groups and interviews and conducted a detailed analysis of the market and broader educational landscape. Those findings gave us a strong foundation as we entered FY27 and began charting the path ahead. Your continued investment will help turn these insights into action — fueling the innovation needed to prepare even more young people with lifelong skills to navigate how they access, share and use news and information in a constantly changing ecosystem.
We are racing toward our vision of every high school graduate stepping into adulthood as a well-informed, active participant in society, strengthened by your support of our work and your belief in our mission. Thank you!
With gratitude and excitement,
Karen and Chuck
