A new report from the Reboot Foundation, a Paris-based nonprofit supporting efforts that elevate critical thinking, notes the work of NLP and highlights our Checkology® virtual classroom as a news literacy resource.

In Fighting Fake News: Lessons From The Information Wars, Helen Lee Bouygues, the foundation’s founder and president, examined existing literature, interviewed experts and conducted independent research to answer the questions “So what can be done?” and “What should be done?” to combat “the influence of fake news.” Her research  examined the effectiveness of interventions that “aimed to improve people’s ability to distinguish fake and legitimate news” and demonstrated that people can become better at identifying misinformation.

In her conclusion, Bouygues wrote that informed consumers may be the best line of defense against misinformation and disinformation: “But above all, the solution to fake news comes down to savvy news consumers. More engaged critical thinkers can stem the fake news crisis and strengthen democracies around the world.”

The report identifies both NLP and Stony Brook University, home to the Center for News Literacy, as leaders in developing curricula and digital resources for schools. The report also lists NLP and Checkology in its list of  resources.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, discussed our work and offered tips for spotting misinformation on the Oct. 31 episode of the NPR podcast Life Kit, hosted by Miles Parks (starting at 10:50). Adams explains how to spot misinformation shared by others and explores how people can recognize when they aren’t reacting objectively to what they’re watching, viewing or hearing. (One sign, he says, is an immediate emotional response, such as fear or outrage.) He also cautions against trusting what you see immediately when events are rapidly changing, noting that standards-based news organizations take time to report verified information, while clickbait-seekers and promoters of misinformation and disinformation are quick to post stories, photos and videos.

The podcast also introduces Informable, NLP’s free mobile app, where users of all ages will be able to test their news literacy skills in five games, such as “Ad or Not” and “Evidence or Not.” It’s coming soon (sign up for a notification email here) on the App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android).

In a report Sunday about violence in northern Syria, ABC’s “World News Tonight“ included a video clip of a nighttime machine gun exhibition at a Kentucky shooting range. Anchor Tom Llamas mistakenly described it as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians.”  While ABC made a serious error in including this footage, the lapse fueled cynical notions about how standards-based news organizations work.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, puts the incident in context in a piece for Poynter Institute. “This is a good reminder of a fundamental concept in news literacy: Not all information — including misinformation — is created with the same motivations and processes. Most significant errors and breaches of standards at major news outlets are driven by a desire to break news,” he writes.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, discusses his work and the value of partnering with the National Association of Media Literacy Education and others in the field.

In an interview with UCLA Magazine (the alumni magazine of the University of California, Los Angeles), Matea Gold, editor of the political investigations team at The Washington Post, talks about her work with the News Literacy Project and our role in combating misinformation. Gold, a member of NLP’s National Leadership Council, is a longtime NLP volunteer and in 2016 was the first recipient of our John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year Award.

EdSurge, an education news organization that focuses on education technology, featured Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, and Valeria Luquin, recipient of NLP’s 2019 Gwen Ifill Student of the Year Award, in its Sept. 24 podcast discussing news literacy and the challenge of teaching students to navigate a relentless flow of information online.

NLP’s recently announced partnership with the E.W. Scripps Company was the topic of a segment today on Cincinnati Edition, a public affairs program on NPR affiliate WVXU. Alan Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO, and Scripps CEO Adam Symson explained how — and why — Scripps and NLP are teaming up to help people become savvy news consumers and to recognize quality journalism and the important role it plays in a democracy.

Seven Days, an independent weekly newspaper based in Burlington, Vermont, interviewed NLP’s associate director of education, Suzannah Gonzales, for the Aug. 7 article “Real or Fake? Test Your News Literacy by Taking Our Quiz.” The article also included questions from NLP’s own news literacy quiz.

NLP’s Newsroom to Classroom program gets a shout-out from a columnist and college student on the website of the News Media Alliance on July 22. Arantxa Hernandez writes that students of all ages need to learn how to better discern credible journalism from irresponsible, biased or misleading content.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an op-ed by NLP Director of Education John Silva on July 25 regarding the urgent need for news literacy education. John was in Columbia, Missouri, that week to participate in news literacy workshops at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The Washington Post’s education reporter Valerie Strauss discusses the work of NLP and features resources from The Sift®, our free weekly newsletter for educators, in her piece on how the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has become a tool for teachers. The column ran July 24, 2019, the day Mueller testified before Congress about his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald J. Trump.

Civics education is a cornerstone of news literacy, and legislators in Illinois have passed — and sent to Gov. JB Pritzker for his signature — a bill that would require a civics course in middle school. (State education standards already require a civics course in high school.) Peter Medlin of Northern Public Radio, the broadcast arm of Northern Illinois University, interviewed NLP’s Peter Adams, senior vice president of education, and John Silva, director of education, in his report on the importance of civics education for students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

The Pulitzer Prizes website promoted NLP’s Newsroom to Classroom in an article on June 25, 2019. The piece explains how Newsroom to Classroom works and notes that it expands on NLP’s original journalist volunteer program.

In a commentary published by USA Today, NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller connects the viral pandemic of misinformation and the rapidly increasing growth in the number of measles cases across the United States and around the world. He notes that decisions and actions based on false information may pose real dangers — and, in the case of decisions about vaccination, can have life-or-death consequences.

Sunday’s episode of In Depth with Hal Eisner, a news program that airs on Fox11 in Los Angeles, led with a segment on misinformation featuring NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller and Valeria Luquin, a high school student who has learned valuable news literacy skills from NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom. Eisner then invited Valeria’s mother, Lorena, to join them for a more detailed conversation about NLP and news literacy education on his podcast, What the Hal?

Answer Sheet, The Washington Post’s education blog, reprinted an essay written by NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller and published earlier this week on NLP’s Medium page. Miller’s essay, “Stop the Misinformation Virus: Don’t Be a Carrier,” discusses the importance of news literacy education. “The ability to distinguish fact from fiction is as important a skill as any other that kids learn in school,” Post reporter Valerie Strauss writes in her introduction. In addition, CNN’s Brian Stelter devoted a section of his Reliable Sources newsletter to Miller’s essay, describing it as “provocative framing.”

Boulder Weekly, a news outlet in Boulder, Colorado, interviewed NLP’s Alan C. Miller about the need for news literacy. The Colorado legislature is considering a bill that would require media literacy education in schools. “We need to teach students to think like journalists,” Miller said, and “the educators need to be informed to inform their students.”

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller discussed NLP’s mission — ensuring that young people learn the news literacy skills needed to navigate today’s challenging information landscape — during an in-depth interview on the PBS public affairs program The Open Mind. Watch “Alan Miller: You’re Not Entitled to Your Own Facts” here.

Engadget, EdSurge and 9to5Mac featured items on Apple’s new initiative, announced March 19, to support three “nonpartisan, independent media literacy programs” in the United States and in Italy, including the News Literary Project.

“While an educator’s first mission is to teach students a body of knowledge, their second is to ensure that students learn how to find information on their own, and navigate what they discover, safely, on their own,” writes Lauren Barack of Education Dive. NLP’s $5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will allow NLP to expand its programs, she says.

A series of Presidents Day tweets by our founder and CEO, Alan C. Miller, featured the words of several U.S. presidents — from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush — about the role of the press. The tweet thread caught the eye of Dave Mowery, managing editor of the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle, who wrote about it, noting that it shouldn’t take a holiday to remind us all of the importance of a free press.

Following the announcement of Knight Foundation’s $5 million support for NLP’s work, NLP founder and CEO Alan Miller spoke to EdSurge, a news site focusing on educational technology. “This is enormously validating for us, and gratifying, because it says they see what we’re doing as credible,” he told reporter Emily Tate.

Liz Ramos, a history and social studies teacher at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California, features NLP resources in her roundup of news and media literacy tools (PDF download) for Social Studies Review, published by the California Council for the Social Studies.

During an interview broadcast Jan. 19 on C-SPAN, Walt Mossberg, the noted technology journalist and an NLP board member, spoke at length about NLP’s work and his feeling that our mission is “very important at this juncture to save democracy.”

Teachers and librarians often find themselves standing for long periods, and School Library Journal has a solution for their fatigued feet: the “Freedom” line of women’s shoes from the Samuel Hubbard Shoe Company, featuring the First Amendment engraved on the sole. Even better, SLJ executive editor Kathy Ishizuka notes, each purchase benefits the News Literacy Project — the company is donating $20 from every sale to NLP.

Once again, Washingtonian magazine has included the News Literacy Project as a local nonprofit that is “worthy of your money.” Adia H. Robinson writes that NLP is among “ten that we’re particularly enthusiastic about this year.”

Damaso Reyes, our director of partnerships, was interviewed for a report on media literacy that was published yesterday in El País, the largest national news outlet in Spain. The article explored the importance of ensuring that students learn to sort fact from fiction at a young age and cited our Checkology® virtual classroom as a vital tool for gaining those skills.

Small Humans, a Mashable series about raising children, explored the skills children need to avoid being fooled by “fake news.” Among the experts interviewed was Peter Adams, our senior vice president of education, who said that equipping teens to deal with misinformation is a moral imperative. “Information is the basis of students’ civic literacy, civic engagement, and civic empowerment, so to not give them the tools they need to navigate the 21st-century information landscape and make smart decisions is fundamentally disempowering,” he said.

Alan Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project, was a featured guest on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Tuesday morning. He discussed misinformation, the upcoming midterm elections and NLP’s “Double-Check Your Facts” campaign, featuring The Easiest Quiz of All Time, and took calls from viewers.

The political reporters at the Los Angeles Times wrap up their guide to the midterm elections with some timely advice:

“And remember to do your homework ahead of time. As the educational nonprofit News Literacy Project reminds, double-check your facts before you vote.”

They also feature the video of The Easiest Quiz of All Time.

Thanks, L.A. Times!

NBC4, the NBC station in Washington, D.C., broadcast a report on our Checkology virtual classroom and the students who use it at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. They said that they get most of their news from social media, but, as one noted, “half of it’s probably lies.” Checkology, said teacher Patricia Hunt, “helps them make sense of their world.”

Noel Achariam, a reporter for the online news portal The Malaysian Insight, talked with NLP’s Alan Miller during a recent visit to the United States (registration required). The rise in social media as a primary source for news has created a pathway for the spread of misinformation and disinformation, Miller said, because “there is no barrier to entry to those who seek to mislead, deceive or exploit.” What’s needed, he said, is “a concerted educational effort” to teach news literacy skills.

Big Deal Media, which keeps track of the best educational resources available, featured NLP’s Checkology virtual classroom in the Oct. 15 issue of its K-12 Technology Newsletter, which is sent to an audience of more than 55,000 tech-savvy educators. The platform was described as “an immersive online learning hub where students in grades 6-12 can hone their critical thinking skills to become and stay informed.”

Nicholas Ibekwe was among 25 international journalists at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, D.C., last week, hearing from NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller. The group is on a two-week reporting tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department titled “Media Literacy and Combatting Misinformation.” Read Ibekwe’s report about how NLP is training future fact-checkers in Nigeria’s Premium Times.

In an opinion piece for PCMag, veteran tech reporter Tim Bajarin says the News Literacy Project and its programs should “become a fundamental building block of our students’ educational process” because it offers “the proper tools to judge between fact and fiction”: “It does not tell students which news source to use but rather, teaches them how to evaluate the accuracy of any news content.”

Our founder and CEO was the featured guest recently on the National Press Club’s podcast, Update-1. “We have students asking ‘What is news?'” said Alan C. Miller, explaining how our work tackles a great need for news literacy when credible news is mixed into social feeds already filled with rumors, ads and propaganda.

“There is hope for your children to be critical thinkers and not merely test-takers,” says NLP board member Walt Mossberg during the “yup” part of This Week in Nope, a podcast that offers a droll review of the week’s news. Hosts Rachel Dodes and Brian Hecht asked Mossberg, the former executive editor of Recode, to appear on this week’s show because they, too, are big supporters of news literacy.

In an article published today in Fast Company — a magazine that reports on innovations in technology, leadership, ideas and design — Mark Sullivan and Tim Bajarin write about NLP and our decade of work, first in individual classrooms and now online. Their conclusion: “The News Literacy Project has emerged as one of the most important educational tools for our time.”

Mother Jones is offering readers some practical tips for identifying disinformation online — including guidance from Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, and Claire Wardle of First Draft, the host of our Checkology® lesson on misinformation. It’s part of the magazine’s new disinformation beat, which includes asking readers to keep an eye out for (and report) dodgy social media posts and political ads in advance of November’s midterm elections.

In its story headlined “How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News,” Time magazine asks, “Why are even the smartest among us so bad at making judgments about what to trust on the web? And how can we get better?” It also quotes our founder and CEO: “It’s the equivalent of a public-health crisis.”

The piece explores issues familiar to those who know about news literacy, including what’s behind “our online gullibility” and the steps people can take not to be fooled (lessons, not so incidentally, that educators apply in their classes through our Checkology® virtual classroom).