Charles (Chuck) Salter joined the News Literacy Project as its first-ever chief operating officer in 2018 and was named president and COO in 2019. He became NLP’s second CEO in July 2022. Before joining NLP, he spent nearly two decades in the education field, working to advance opportunity in under-resourced communities. He served as a teacher, school leader, teachers union president and senior executive with several national education organizations, including Teach For America in California, New York and Nevada; the Bay Area After-School All-Stars in California; and regional director, vice president and superintendent of schools with Lighthouse Academies, a national nonprofit charter management organization, where he managed a group of six schools outside of Chicago that enrolled more than 2,200 students. Most recently, he was president and chief operating officer of BUILD, a national youth entrepreneurship organization with programs in the Bay Area of northern California, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York City and Boston. Chuck earned a bachelor’s degree in international studies and German with university and departmental honors from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. He holds a juris doctor degree from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in Bloomington and has graduate certificates from Indiana University and Harvard University in nonprofit management, from Ball State University in business studies and from Cornell University in change leadership. He is a member of the Indiana Bar and a trained community mediator.

Select media appearances

90.5 WESA Pittsburgh’s NPR station, Amid AI summaries and misinformation, Pittsburgh-area schools teach students to check their facts, Sept. 15, 2025

Scripps News, New study finds teens lack trust in media as online conspiracies flourish, Oct. 22 2024

Inside Philanthropy, Broad foundation partners with News Literacy Project to support media literacy education, Oct. 21, 2024

Semafor, InfoWars’ victims and enemies consider buying it, Sept. 30, 2022