Tracie Potts, a Washington correspondent with NBC News Channel, is one of two recipients of this year’s John S. Carroll Journalist Fellow Award.

“I am so honored,” she said after being presented with the award at an NLP dinner in June. “To be selected from among well-deserving colleagues by a respected group of journalists and journalism educators makes this beautiful plaque quite valuable to me.”

Named for one of the most revered newspaper editors of his generation, the award is given annually to volunteer journalists who contribute significantly to NLP and its mission. The honorees are selected by a committee of NLP board members and staff.

Paul Saltzman, the Sunday and investigations editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, was presented with his award at an NLP event in Chicago in May.

During her eight years as an NLP journalist fellow, Potts has delivered more than a dozen classroom lessons in schools in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. She also is the host of “Know Your Zone: Sorting Information,” the first lesson in NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

In addition, she was featured in a Washington Post report about NLP, was pictured on the cover of NLP’s brochure and has assisted staff members at conferences.

NLP’s president and CEO, Alan C. Miller, described her as a “willing, enthusiastic and gracious stalwart” for news literacy.

Kyle Morean, who used NLP’s curriculum in his media literacy classes at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School in Washington, said that whenever Potts was the speaker, he knew his class would run long because the students were “eager to keep asking her questions.”

Potts, said Morean, was “an outstanding guest and engaging presenter.”

Recipients of the award receive $500 and an engraved glass plaque with an etched photo of Carroll, who was the editor of the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, The Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. He also was one of NLP’s earliest supporters, served for four years as board chair and was a board member at the time of his death in 2015.

Paul Saltzman, an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has won the News Literacy Project’s 2017 John S. Carroll Journalist Fellow Award.

“Paul has been one of NLP’s most engaged and effective journalist fellows since he first volunteered in 2011,” said NLP President Alan C. Miller. “His remarkable dedication to our mission has earned him our heartfelt appreciation and this well-deserved recognition.”

The award — named after the revered editor of three U.S. newspapers and the former chairman of NLP’s board — is given annually to volunteer journalists who contribute significantly to NLP and its mission. The honorees are selected by a committee of NLP board members and staff.

Saltzman is the Sun-Times’ Sunday editor and investigations editor for projects. Reports he has edited have won the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting, the Society of Professional Journalists’ national Sigma Delta Chi Award for breaking news coverage and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence Award.

He has been one of NLP’s most engaged journalist fellows, actively recruiting colleagues and organizing orientations, online conversations with students, field trips and other events. He has visited at least six classrooms across Chicago, has worked with two different student groups in local libraries as part of the News Know-how program, and has met with students during their field trips to the Sun-Times newsroom.

“When I first started working with the News Literacy Project, we were happy to be able to reach a couple dozen more kids,” Saltzman said. “Now, my paper has just hosted 100 teachers and librarians who’ll carry the message back to schools across Chicago.

“And the online lessons that I and others have done are seen around the world — even in Macedonia, storied birthplace of so much fake news. But what I thought at the beginning is still what I think: How could anyone not want to do this?”

Saltzman has played an important role in NLP’s e-learning efforts: He was featured in several early video and digital lessons, leads one — “What Is News?” — in NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom and helped to create a graphic organizer featuring seven key questions, dubbed “The Saltzman Seven.”

“He is remarkably dedicated to NLP’s mission,” said Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for educational programs, who lives in Chicago and has worked closely with Saltzman. “In fact, he has yet to say no to any request an NLP staffer has ever made of him — no matter how substantial.”

Saltzman is one of two NLP journalist fellows to be honored with the Carroll Award this year. He received the prize — $500 and a glass plaque with an etched photo of Carroll — at a private dinner in Chicago in May. The second recipient will be announced in June.

“I’m proud to be a part of the News Literacy Project, hoping to do much more and very appreciative of this honor,” Saltzman said.

Carroll, the second person to join NLP’s board, died on June 14, 2015. He also served four years as board chairman and remained on the board until his death. He was the editor of the Los Angeles Times from 2000 to 2005, during which time the paper won 13 Pulitzer Prizes. He also was the editor of The Baltimore Sun (1991-2000) and the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader (1979-1991). He served on the Pulitzer Prize board from 1994 to 2003 and was its chairman in 2002.

“My generation — whatever we see on social media, we believe,” Daniella Alexander, a high school senior, told a group of News Literacy Project supporters and friends at a VIP breakfast Wednesday with Chuck Todd of NBC News.

Daniella Alexander, a senior at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, addresses guests at the VIP breakfast.

And because of NLP’s latest resource, the Checkology® virtual classroom, Alexander now looks at what she reads a lot more skeptically.

She acknowledged that she hadn’t really cared about the news before she participated in the virtual classroom as part of her government class at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But now, she said, she is “able to stop and say, ‘Hmm. This is not reliable! This source isn’t credible!”

“I’ve developed a newfound appreciation for journalism and how it works,” she said. The platform “taught me to have both sides of the story, whether or not I like them or not.”

“It’s definitely necessary for my generation, especially, and for the generation after me,” she added. It “gave me skills that I will need and that I can pass on to people and tell them, ‘Checkology® is so accessible, it’s so easy … you can learn so much from it.’”

In short, Alexander said, “Checkology® is super-vital and super-important.”

Patricia Hunt, Alexander’s teacher, also praised the platform, telling the group at the breakfast that her students “now have the language, have the tools, to look at pieces objectively. They can be skeptical consumers of news.”

Hunt’s use of the Checkology® platform was featured in December in a report on NPR’s All Things Considered about “the classroom where fake news fails” and again in February in a piece on the evening news on WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate for the Washington area. In addition, she was quoted in an article last month on CNN’s website that described the virtual classroom as one of the “new weapons” in the war on fake news.

Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University’s Vancouver campus, has written a blog post in which he takes issue with what he understands to be the focus and methods of news literacy as a field.

“How ‘News Literacy’ Gets Web Misinformation Wrong” was published last month on Caulfield’s own website and earlier this month on Medium and Observer.com. In it, Caulfield specifically cites our Checkology® virtual classroom, a web-based e-learning platform for educators and students in middle school and high school.

We thank Caulfield for his interest in our work and for advancing the discussion on the literacies that contemporary students need to learn to become critical thinkers. For him, it’s web literacy; for us, it’s news literacy. In many ways, we agree with Caulfield’s ideas; in others, we take a narrower view. In this case, we believe his critique of our work offers an opportunity to demonstrate how we define and teach news literacy.

The News Literacy Project was founded in 2008 with this guiding principle: to teach students to sort fact from fiction in the digital age. Our lessons have been successfully implemented in middle schools, high schools, libraries and after-school programs, starting with our first pilots in the spring of 2009. They’ve also been embraced by educators: As many as 5,600 teachers serving more than 850,000 students throughout the United States and in 50 other countries have registered to use the Checkology® virtual classroom since it was released last May.

In his piece, Caulfield tries to address what he considers weaknesses in the Checkology® platform. However, the resource that he references throughout his piece is not the virtual classroom, and it is not part of the Checkology® lessons. It is a one-page set of guidelines, “Ten Questions for Fake News Detection,” that we created last year in the middle of the rising public awareness about so-called fake news.

This graphic organizer is intended to help students detect a very specific type of misinformation by walking them through a series of questions that raise red flags about the authenticity of a piece of ostensible news. Like many of the student resources we publish, these questions were created to help students understand the significance of specific details in a piece of information, with the expectation that they will begin to use them instinctively when they come across news and other types of information.

Caulfield’s critique takes this list of questions out of context in an attempt to show how it falls short as a practical, effective process for evaluating the general credibility of all types of information. To try to prove how this process fails in practice, he also picks up passages (including student quotes) from a news report about students who have used the Checkology® virtual classroom.

Some Clarifications

Had Caulfield called us to verify what he was writing about — a key point in both web and news literacies — we would have been able to clarify a few things.

First, the “Ten Questions” worksheet is not the Checkology® virtual classroom. Second, it was never intended to be used as a full process for evaluating the credibility of all types of information. Finally, we would have pointed out that pulling quotes from an unrelated report is unfair, even if the students quoted were making statements about the same guidelines Caulfield is attacking. We could have provided examples of how teachers and students are finding the virtual classroom extremely valuable.

Caulfield runs his own media literacy initiative, a wiki-based fact-checking website aimed at secondary and post-secondary students. We applaud his efforts to create a hub for what he calls “web literacy,” because the goals and methods of web literacy are largely identical to those of news literacy. We agree, for example, that students need to experience news and media and web and information literacy in the context in which they experience information and that this instruction needs to result in a functional, practical difference in the way they consume and create information.

We too believe that students need a community of practice where they can exercise these skills. We applaud Caulfield’s dedication to creating a community in which students from schools across the country can either write up entries on specific claims or edit and question existing claims by others. We also believe that students need to be taught news/media/web/information literacies in the language of the web. They need to learn to look for sources that are linked and notice when they’re not; to follow a series of links “upstream” to the original claim and then assess that original claim; and to follow links and search results to other pieces of information about the same topic.

We at the News Literacy Project are proud of the work that we are doing to create a news-literate next generation. We intend to continue to improve on these efforts and welcome constructive criticism from Caulfield and others to help us do so. We hope that those who join us in this vital mission will hold themselves to the same standards we ask our students to apply to the news and information that they consume and create.

Our all-new #SeeAlltheAngles campaign features print and digital ads, a new landing page, a Headline Maker app, a downloadable keyboard and printable posters.

Can you read the headline on the right?

No? Good. That’s what we’re hoping. We’d like you to pause for a moment to think — and then dig a little deeper to decipher the meaning of what you’re seeing, just as you should do when determining whether the news you’re reading is real or fake.

That’s the purpose of our new ad campaign, developed as part of a pro bono partnership with J. Walter Thompson New York.

The #SeeAlltheAngles campaign features print and digital ads, a new landing page, a Headline Maker app, a downloadable keyboard and printable posters.

It is based on a sideways-facing font that JWT developed just for us — one that puts a literal spin on the alphabet and turns each letter so just its edge is visible. The font encourages readers to think beyond their first impression — and, by extension, reminds them not to take what they see at face value. It will be used in “headlines” in the advertising copy.

These ads are being placed with major news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and AOL. All media space has been donated by Kargo, a mobile advertising agency, and partners of JWT.

To access the tools and to learn more about the font, visit the #SeeAlltheAngles page. We encourage you to use the Headline Maker app (available for iOS and Android) and the keyboard to create your own headlines and send them as text messages. Download the posters and hang them anywhere that could benefit from a news literacy message — classrooms, libraries, after-school programs, even your kids’ rooms. And please share your photos, graphics and text messages with us by emailing them to [email protected].

One last thing: That headline on the right?

“Question everything.”

We hope you do.

The change to its news feed that Facebook is announcing today offers a first line of defense against the spread of false stories, online hoaxes and conspiracy theories.

This is, no doubt, welcome news to fighters against fake news. It certainly is to us, and we’re excited to be part of this global effort.

Starting today, people in 14 countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan) will see an “educational tool” at the top of their news feed for a few days. This tool goes to Facebook’s Help Center, where users will discover tips on preventing the spread of false information — language Facebook developed with First Draft, another news literacy organization.

It will also highlight work by other experts in the field — including the News Literacy Project.

Readers who would like to dig deeper into the issues will be directed to our site, where they’ll get our take on discerning fact from fiction and identifying what can be trusted, shared and acted on (and what shouldn’t be).

This new effort is part of Facebook’s comprehensive strategy to tackle the pernicious issue of fake news, and it complements the collaborations we’ve already established with the world’s largest social media company.

In January, Facebook announced the Facebook Journalism Project, an initiative that will provide Facebook’s worldwide audience with tools and training that promote accurate journalism and news literacy. NLP is one of the initial partners in the program, and the only one focused solely on news literacy.

Earlier this week, NLP’s president and CEO, Alan C. Miller, and Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, participated in the announcement of the News Integrity Initiative — a program, based at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, that brings together a global consortium of 19 academic institutions, nonprofits and individuals to collaborate on efforts that advance the cause of news literacy and improve trust in journalism. Facebook is one of the nine initial funders. Again, NLP is one of the initial partners — and, again, we’re the only one focused solely on news literacy.

And finally, as part of the Facebook Journalism Project, we’re in the final stages of working with Facebook on an ambitious public service advertising campaign that will be released on the platform later this spring.

We’re proud to be working with Facebook on all of these fronts — and we couldn’t be more excited to join Facebook, and others, in taking on the challenge to combat misinformation, spin, propaganda, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, outright falsehoods and fake news.

Today marks a milestone for the News Literacy Project. We’ve been offered an exciting opportunity to amplify and expand our work to give facts a fighting chance.

We’re honored to be a founding participant in the News Integrity Initiative, a global consortium “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

Based at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, the Initiative is launching with $14 million in funding from tech industry leaders, academic institutions, nonprofits and other organizations. It will support applied research and projects and convene meetings with industry experts to advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world and to enhance the public conversation.

I will be part of today’s announcement, which will be broadcast at 4 p.m. ET via Facebook Live on the CUNY Journalism School’s Facebook page. NLP is one of 19 initial participants in the News Integrity Initiative — and is the only one focused primarily on news literacy.

NLP has been a national pioneer in the field of news literacy for nine years, providing innovative lessons and resources that give middle school and high school students the tools to know what to believe in today’s challenging information landscape.

In the aftermath of the bitterly divisive 2016 presidential campaign, which featured daily assaults on truth and partisan attacks on the news media, the world learned hard lessons about the prevalence and power of online hoaxes and conspiracy theories.

For us, the need to extend news literacy to the general population suddenly took on far greater urgency, since the bedrock of a healthy democracy is an informed and engaged electorate. Our ultimate goal is to strengthen the grass roots of our country’s democracy by giving people of all ages, and not just teenagers, the ability to know what news and information to trust, share and act on.

Even as our scope expands, we remain committed to continuing to serve our core community with our Checkology® virtual classroom, which is rapidly growing nationally and worldwide.

We are already working with Facebook on an ambitious public service advertising campaign that will be released on the platform this spring. At this crucial moment for the U.S. and the world, we’re excited by the prospect of being part of this broad and impressive coalition to improve news literacy on a global scale.

Students who complete the News Literacy Project’s core unit report significant changes in the ways they think about, share and respond to news and information they read or watch online, new survey data indicate.

More than 80 percent of the students who responded to the survey said that the unit:

• Improved the way they gathered, used and produced credible information.
• Improved their ability to distinguish quality journalism from other types of news and information.
• Increased their ability to use news to become knowledgeable about their communities, the nation and the world.
• Learned how to exercise civility, respect and care in online communities.

“The News Literacy Project is transforming student consciousness from being insular and impressionable to worldly and critical,” said Jeff Zimmerman, technology director at Our Lady of Tepeyac High School in Chicago.

“My students have a new understanding of the ways that powerful individuals and groups seek control over information to shape public response to important issues. I believe they will carry that insight with them into college and beyond, contributing to a generation of independent thinkers.”

The results come from NLP’s 2015-16 national assessment survey. They are based on pre- and post-unit surveys of students’ attitudes, knowledge and behavior and were collected and analyzed by Anita M. Baker, NLP’s independent evaluation consultant.

The surveys have consistently showed significant changes in students’ knowledge, attitudes and behavior since NLP began administering them in 2009.

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of meaningful formal assessments of student learning,” said Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for educational programs. “It’s not only vital for our teacher partners, but it helps us evaluate and improve our instructional design and resource development. It’s an irreplaceable part of our ongoing mission to provide educators with materials that help them engage and activate students as news literacy learners and citizens.”

In the most recent survey, students also reported that NLP lessons made them more likely to post a comment on a blog (40 percent), ask a news organization to correct a factual error (41 percent) and vote in a local, state or national election when they are old enough to do so (62 percent).

“The News Literacy Project has skillfully taken on the urgent mission of showing young people how to bring critical judgment to their news consumption,” said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, one of NLP’s 33 partner news organizations.

“It’s surpassingly important work — absolutely critical to democracy and civil society.”

When NLP rolled out its dynamic Checkology® virtual classroom last May, our goal was to be in all 50 states with 100,000 registered students by the end of 2017.

We’re just three months into 2017, and we have already enrolled 6,200 educators who teach 775,000 students in urban, suburban and rural areas throughout the United States and in at least 46 countries around the globe, from China to Turkey to South Africa to Brazil to Australia.

Interest surged following the presidential election and the disclosure of the prevalence and power of online rumors, hoaxes and conspiracy theories (“fake news”), accompanied by a growing national debate about the nature and value of real news. Amid increased awareness of the challenge that students face in determining what information to trust, educators have embraced the opportunity to teach core news literacy skills and concepts — including how to detect bias, how to dissect viral rumors and how to use the standards of quality journalism to find credible information.

As teachers bring news literacy to their classrooms, students are recognizing their own need to be news-literate.

“Now we need it even more,” said Catherine Dievendorf, a senior at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. “Consuming news and media blindly destroys our understanding and awareness of bias and deceit that could permeate our news.”

The virtual classroom includes 12 core lessons and supplemental tools that teach news literacy skills and encourages students to apply what they are learning to the news and information they encounter every day. By doing so, they develop the critical-thinking skills that are essential for informed and engaged citizens in a democracy.

The Basic version of the platform provides a single login for teachers and permits them to deliver the lessons in a one-to-many format (on an LCD projector, for example). The Premium version provides subscribers with individual student logins to unlock the full virtual classroom experience, including one-to-one delivery, self-pacing, remediation, individual assessments, points, badges and student discussion.

We’ve received feedback from teachers right from the start, and the spring pilot of the Premium version, which will extend through June, incorporates many of the changes they requested. These include making it more efficient for teachers to offer online feedback to students and giving them more options for student remediation, for blending whole class and individual instruction and for sharing announcements and notifications. We’re also updating examples of information in some lessons and improving key aspects of students’ experience.

Educators: Sign up here to participate in the spring pilot, then share this link with your fellow teachers in middle schools and high schools, librarians, and leaders of after-school programs.

John Silva, who has used the News Literacy Project’s curriculum as a history teacher in Chicago, will now be aiding other educators as NLP’s Checkology™ virtual classroom coordinator.

The new position is the result of the explosion of interest in the virtual classroom, which was introduced in May 2016. In its first 10 months, 4,500 educators who teach 550,000 students throughout the United States and in at least 38 other countries have registered to use the platform.

“As a teacher, I saw firsthand the impact News Literacy Project had on my students and their ability to evaluate and think critically about news and online media,” Silva said. “I became an advocate for NLP among my colleagues and have used NLP curriculum for several years. I am very excited to join the NLP team and bring that curriculum to classrooms throughout the country through the Checkology™ platform.”

He comes to NLP with 13 years of experience as a history teacher with Chicago Public Schools, including seven years at Lindblom Math & Science Academy, one of CPS’s top selective enrollment schools. He began working with NLP at Lindblom, where he implemented the curriculum in his 8th-grade and 11th-grade history classes.

A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Silva spent several years in corporate telecommunications positions before deciding to become a teacher. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in the teaching of history and has a master’s degree in education, with a concentration in educational technologies, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He became a National Board Certified Teacher in 2012.

News literacy’s moment has arrived.

Those of us who have focused for years on the challenges to consumers created by digital media are no longer a voice in the wilderness. Recent events (especially the furor over the primacy and definition of “fake news”) have thrust our mission into the middle of myriad conversations — and have established news literacy education as an urgent national need.

Our work at the News Literacy Project (NLP) offers evidence of this growing demand: In just 10 months, 4,500 educators who teach 550,000 students in every state in the U.S. (and at least 38 other countries) have registered to use NLP’s Checkology™ virtual classroom. Dozens are signing up daily.

It’s a start, but there’s much more to be done. Recognizing both the need and the opportunity, Facebook is convening a News Literacy Working Group this weekend — an initial step to help news literacy practitioners equip a far wider audience with the tools to know what to trust in the digital age.

We’re proud to be joining more than 50 educators, nonprofit leaders, journalists, funders and representatives of social media companies who will be gathering this weekend at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to review their experiences in the field, identify research opportunities and assess projects for funding. I am hopeful that this will be the first of a series of meaningful events for this group.

This meeting is part of the broader Facebook Journalism Project — an initiative by the world’s largest social media company to combat misinformation by working with news organizations, educators and independent fact-checkers and making improvements to its platform.

As part of this initiative, we at NLP are collaborating with Facebook to produce an eight-week public service advertising campaign this spring to help stem the spread of viral rumors, hoaxes, conspiracy theories and other types of misinformation and to help give real news a fighting chance.

We’re well aware that in today’s information ecosystem, the readers, viewers and listeners are in charge. They decide what news to receive and when, where and how to access it. Moreover, they comment on it, they share it and they actively post on social media. We believe that we can help them determine the credibility of what they’re reading, watching and hearing — meaning that they will be less prone to being deceived and to deceiving others.

We also believe that only a concerted national education effort can give the public the ability to be informed, responsible and empowered consumers, creators and sharers of news and information. We are ready to take on this challenge. Nothing less than the health of the nation’s democracy is at stake.

When Dee Burek started teaching debate at Stone Bridge Middle School in Allentown, New Jersey, six years ago, she soon noticed a trend: Her students’ arguments were riddled with inaccuracies.

For his report on NPR, journalist Cory Turner (left) records student interaction with Wakefield High teacher Patricia Hunt as she leads a lesson from the Checkology™ virtual classroom.

No matter how many times she urged them to check their sources, the students would say, “But it’s on the internet,” “There is no author” or “It looks like a real source.”

Pushing them to delve deeper proved challenging until Burek discovered the News Literacy Project’s Checkology™ virtual classroom while researching curriculum for an upcoming journalism elective. She started piloting it with her eighth-grade journalism students in the fall — a time rife with real-world teachable moments that blended perfectly with the platform’s content.

“Just as I was teaching about citizen watchdogs, a package arrived in the mailbox of a New York Times reporter with some pages of Donald Trump’s tax return,” she said. “Then as I taught the lesson on bias, BuzzFeed released a dossier on Donald Trump. The kids were so excited to talk about it the next day and start trying to get to the truth.”

Burek was so impressed with the platform that she took one of her students to a school board meeting to advocate for its use in classrooms throughout the district.

“The Checkology™ virtual classroom has empowered my students,” she said. “Their critical-thinking skills have improved. They will leave my class with knowledge that is desperately needed to survive in today’s world.”

As news literacy is increasingly being recognized as an essential skill, teachers nationwide are finding the platform to be a seamless way to incorporate it into their existing curricula.

“The students and I are loving [the] Checkology™ [platform]!” said Patricia Hunt, a government teacher at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., whose participation in the fall pilot was featured in reports on NPR and on WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate for Washington, D.C. “It has fit beautifully with our examination of the political process and focus on core democratic values. The students continually make connections to the material and learning, especially in light of the coverage and impact of fake news.”

Across the country, Liz Ramos, who teaches AP government and world history at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., said the platform has helped give her students “the tools to evaluate credible takes on a story, examine and understand the various purposes of news and media, and to be aware of bias and deceit by providing a framework to question the news and social media postings and be critical thinkers for reference in life moving forward.”

The idea for the News Literacy Project came to me in 2006, when I spoke to my daughter’s sixth-grade classmates about what I did as a journalist and why it mattered.

I left her middle school that day thinking that if a lot of journalists brought their expertise and experience to bear in this way, it could have a significant impact on education and on the future of journalism.

Two years later, after 21 years as a reporter, I left the Los Angeles Times and started NLP. At the time, I thought of it as moving from the supply side of journalism to the demand side.

But as we began to work in secondary schools with our classroom, after-school and e-learning programs, my perspective broadened. Increasingly, I saw our greatest benefit as strengthening the grass roots of the country’s democracy by giving the next generation the tools to know what news and information to trust, share and act on, both as students and as future voters. After all, the bedrock of a healthy democracy is an informed and engaged electorate.

From the beginning, people told me that this was a great idea — and that adults needed these skills, too. Or at least some adults: My mother-in-law, who sends me all kinds of cockamamie things she finds online, needs this. My uncle, who believes everything he hears on the radio, needs this. Or even: I need this!

But we had already undertaken an enormous mission: educating teenagers that all information isn’t created equal. We found that impressionable younger students often believed that if someone put something on the internet, it must be true. Some high school students, on the other hand, were already cynical enough to believe that all news or information is equally driven by an agenda — and, in the case of news, by personal, political and commercial bias. Some even viewed raw information — for instance, random musings in a blog post or a cellphone video uploaded to YouTube — as more reliable than a news report published or broadcast by mainstream media.

Moreover, our goal was ambitious, too: to embed news literacy in the American educational experience. In May 2016, building on all of our work since 2008, we launched our Checkology™ virtual classroom as our path to exponential growth nationwide. We were heartened to see the platform quickly gain traction in every state in the country.

Then, following a bitterly divisive 2016 presidential campaign that featured daily assaults on truth and partisan attacks on the news media, we learned about the prevalence and power of online hoaxes and conspiracy theories. The need to extend news literacy to the general population suddenly took on far greater urgency.

So NLP has embraced the opportunity to develop, with Facebook’s support, a public service ad campaign for the world’s most popular social media platform. Not only is this consistent with our mission, but it will enable us to create creative and compelling messages that take advantage of Facebook’s exceptional targeting capabilities to promote news literacy among a massive new audience of engaged adults, as well as young people.

This campaign will raise awareness of the importance of being a skeptical and responsible consumer of news and information. It will help give millions of Facebook users the ability to discern credible information from raw information, propaganda and misinformation. And it will elevate the field of news literacy and reinforce NLP’s leadership role.

We may even reach some of my daughter’s sixth-grade classmates. They’re now young adults and no doubt are getting much of their news and information from Facebook. It would be a fitting way to reconnect.

Facebook is supporting a public service advertising (PSA) campaign by the News Literacy Project (NLP) that will provide Facebook users with the tools to become informed consumers of news and information and to know which sources to trust, the company announced today.

“As Facebook seeks to support journalism, we will also be working on new ways to help give people information so they can make smart choices about the news they read — and have meaningful conversations about what they care about,” Fidji Simo, Facebook’s director of product, wrote in a blog post.

This effort is part of the Facebook Journalism Project, a broad initiative “designed to support quality journalism and news literacy” through partnerships with news outlets and nonprofit organizations. NLP is the only news literacy organization invited to participate.

The PSA campaign — which will include videos and other multimedia elements familiar to Facebook users — will raise awareness of the importance of being a skeptical and responsible consumer of news and information and will elevate the profile of the field of news literacy and of NLP and its programs. It will enable NLP, which to date has worked exclusively with students in middle school and high school, to extend its reach to the general public on a mass scale. Facebook has more than 1.8 billion active users worldwide.

NLP will use Facebook’s targeting capabilities to reach a wide range of users. This will allow NLP to build on the initial success of its classroom, after-school and e-learning programs, including its cutting-edge Checkology™ virtual classroom, an online platform that helps students discern fact from fiction through a range of exercises and video lessons led by prominent journalists and other experts.

“NLP welcomes the opportunity to work with Facebook to bring news literacy lessons and skills to an enormous and engaged audience,” said NLP President Alan C. Miller. “We look forward to providing Facebook users with the tools to recognize what information to trust and share and how to spot stories and posts based on false information, viral rumors and conspiracy theories.”

NLP will work with Facebook’s creative advertising team to develop the PSAs, which will appear exclusively on the social media platform during an eight-week period this spring. Facebook has retained Scot Safon, the former chief marketing officer at CNN Worldwide, to collaborate on these messages with NLP, which will have final editorial control over the content.

NLP teaches that all information is not created equal and uses the aspirational standards of quality journalism to determine what should be trusted, shared and acted on. It also fosters an understanding of the importance of the First Amendment and a free press in a democracy. NLP’s primary mission is to provide programs and resources that teach secondary school students how to differentiate credible information from raw information, misinformation and propaganda in the digital age.

In Facebook’s blog post, Simo said that the company “will work with third-party organizations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off our platform to help people in our community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust. We will help organizations already doing important work in this area, such as the News Literacy Project, and bring a consortium of experts together to help decide on what new research to conduct and projects to fund.”

In addition to making a financial donation to support NLP, Facebook is providing engineering assistance from its partnership team to help NLP determine how to develop an app that will effectively support its educational work, which will remain independent of Facebook.

Facebook also said that it will expand training for journalists and will partner with news organizations to develop new storytelling formats, support local news and find ways to encourage its users to subscribe to news outlets.

The Facebook Journalism Project is the company’s second major step to address hoaxes and fake news since coming under criticism for the use of its platform as a means of spreading factually inaccurate and outright false stories during the presidential election. The company announced last month that it was making it easier for users to report suspicious posts and reducing the financial incentives for those who create hoaxes. It also launched a program in collaboration with the Poynter Institute to give independent fact-checking organizations the ability to flag suspect Facebook posts.

The News Literacy Project, a national education nonprofit, was founded in 2008 by Miller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2003 as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times. NLP has delivered innovative classroom, after-school and digital programs to diverse and dynamic schools in New York City, Chicago, Houston and the Washington, D.C., area since 2009.

In May, it launched the Checkology™ virtual classroom, which is the culmination of all its work to date and its primary path to national scale. This e-learning platform, available anywhere there is an internet connection, provides students with engaging, real-world lessons that foster critical thinking skills. Leading journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NBC News, Bloomberg and the Chicago Sun-Times are joined by experts on the First Amendment and digital media as virtual teachers and video-based guides throughout the core lessons.

More than 2,000 educators who teach more than 220,000 students in all 50 states and the District of Columbia have registered to use the platform.

Steve Schmidt, who held top positions in two Republican presidential campaigns and serves as a political analyst on MSNBC, has joined the News Literacy Project’s board.

“Steve brings distinctive experience and expertise to the NLP board,” board chairman Greg McCaffery said. “His impressive skills as a public affairs and political strategist will serve us well as we seek to create the next generation of informed and engaged citizens.”

Schmidt is vice chairman for public affairs at Edelman, the world’s largest public relations agency. Topics on which he has provided counsel include telecommunications, technology, financial services, energy, health care, entertainment and gaming.

He was a top strategist on President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and served in the Bush administration as a deputy assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president. He also played a leading role in the Supreme Court confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, directing strategic communications for the Roberts nomination and heading the nomination team for Alito.

In 2006, Schmidt left the White House to run the successful re-election campaign of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2007, he served as a senior adviser to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination; once McCain secured the nomination in 2008, Schmidt ran the day-to-day operations for his presidential campaign.

Schmidt is the fourth highly accomplished individual to join NLP’s board in the last year. The others are David M. Marchick, managing partner at The Carlyle Group; Karen Wickre, a digital media pioneer who held senior communications positions at Twitter and Google for nearly 15 years; and Eva Haller, a respected nonprofit leader and philanthropist. Board members serve renewable three-year terms.

Veteran journalist Leslie Hoffecker is joining the News Literacy Project as its senior editor.

Hoffecker, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, Congressional Quarterly and Bloomberg, had served as NLP’s pro bono editor and Keeper of Standards since the project’s founding in February 2008. She will be the first employee to serve in the newly created staff position.

“Leslie has been an invaluable asset to NLP from Day One,” said NLP President Alan C. Miller, who worked with Hoffecker at the Los Angeles Times. “Her impressive skills as a writer and editor combined with her extensive knowledge of NLP make her a great addition at a time when we plan to dramatically raise our national profile.”

A graduate of Vassar College, Hoffecker began her journalism career as Philadelphia magazine’s copy editor — a position she obtained after noticing an unusual number of errors in an issue and writing to the editor to point them out. Her tenure at the Inquirer included a Pulitzer Prize for Local General or Spot News Reporting (as a member of the reporting and editing team that covered the Three Mile Island nuclear accident) and internal citations from the paper for her work on two other Pulitzer winners.

“I’m excited to be joining NLP full-time,” she said. “The recent furor over ‘fake news’ has only emphasized how important it is to make sure that students are taught how to know what to believe and how to share it responsibly.”

She also spent several years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as a stringer for The Associated Press and the editor of a joint program of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Saudi Ministry of Health that trained Arab physicians in disease control and surveillance. In addition, she worked for two years for a boutique public relations firm in Alexandria, Va., where she edited materials as varied as annual reports and communications strategies for U.S. government agencies and social media posts for nonprofits.

Hoffecker, Miller said, “will give NLP the capacity to create and share more content on social media and elsewhere to help meet the growing demand for news literacy education.”

As we reflect on 2016, we look back at some of our social media posts that you liked most.

We’re sharing your top five favorites for one more read:

1. Our guide to spotting fake news
2. Facebook taking steps to combat misinformation
3. Our new Checkology™ virtual classroom
4. “In Jest”
5. Biggest publishers of hoaxes and fake news

A survey released by the Pew Research Center today shows that fabricated news stories are causing members of the public to be confused about basic facts.

About two in three U.S. adults say that fake news has caused “a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current events,” while roughly another quarter say it causes them “some” confusion.

Despite this confusion, 84 percent of those surveyed reported that they felt a degree of confidence in their ability to spot fake news when they saw it.

“What’s encouraging about these findings is the fact that so many Americans are aware that fake news is a serious problem,” said Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for educational programs.

“But given what we also know about the power of fake news, it seems clear that this is something people need to continue to pay close attention to, no matter how confident they might be in their ability to catch it.”

We have been working to address misinformation — including viral rumors, hoaxes, propaganda and other forms of fake information — in classrooms for years. Our Checkology™ virtual classroom offers lessons to help students think critically about what they’re reading online, including a unit on “immunizing” themselves from viral rumors. It provides a “Check Tool” to help students develop news-literate habits of mind.

We are also tackling the problem of fake news head on. We have created a tip sheet for students called “Ten Questions for Fake News Detection,” and we’re working on a guide for the general public. “Fake News: A Guide — Tools, Tips and Resources to Combat Misinformation Online” will be available to the public in coming days.

We recognize that many outlets, too, are working to fix the problem. Facebook’s announcement today of plans to work with fact-checking groups to tackle fake news is a step in the right direction.

But we firmly believe that news literacy education is the best long-term solution to the problem.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for education programs, led a workshop on how educators can use authentic examples of viral rumors to drive civic learning and engagement.

The session couldn’t have come at a better time. With little regulation or controls, social media platforms occupy a greater and greater space in the public attention zone. And after a divisive presidential campaign where rumors, innuendoes and outright lies often competed for air time with conventional political rhetoric, educators are grappling with ways to address the spread of fake news and looking to engage their students’ critical thinking.

“Disinformation is getting better and sneakier,” Adams said during the session. “The good news is that the tools to check it out are getting better and more plentiful.”

Adams then joined Washington Post reporter Krissah Thompson and Steven Becton of Facing History and Ourselves for a panel discussion about the critical role of credible information in a robust democracy, through the lens of the news and information that appeared following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Adams talked about confirmation bias, in which people interpret or recall information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs and ideas.

“Our feelings congeal almost immediately,” Adams said when describing a phenomenon that is also known sometimes as confirmatory bias or myside bias. “Then our rational mind sets about justifying why we have the feelings we have.”

NLP partnered with Facing History to develop “Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age,” an educational resource examining the information aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown and the protests that followed, which became a flashpoint for discussion about race, policing and justice.

Adams and Becton also led a session introducing and exploring the resource.

Teachers who stopped by NLP’s booth at the conference on Friday had the chance to meet three of the NLP journalist fellows featured in the Checkology™ virtual classroom. James Grimaldi of The Wall Street Journal, who appears in a lesson on the watchdog role of journalists in American democracy, Tracie Potts of NBC News Channel, who guides students through a lesson on filtering information according to its primary purpose, and Matea Gold of the Washington Post, who hosts a lesson on viral content, were all on hand to meet teachers.

The conference closed with a keynote panel, “Demasclerosis: The Challenge of Moving America Forward in a Hyper-Partisan Age,” produced by NLP and moderated by longtime broadcast journalist and NLP journalist fellow Ray Suarez, and featuring two of the nation’s leading columnists and commentators, Ruth Marcus and Michael Gerson, both of The Washington Post.

“You need citizens who show civility, empathy and discernment about the truth,” Gerson said. He encouraged the hundreds of educators in the room to teach citizenship because, more than ever, they are “on the front lines of defending the American ideal.”

The audience of hundreds of social studies teachers from around the country responded with a standing ovation.

Christian Armstrong grew up in the same housing projects where Michelle Obama had lived as a young girl — a notoriously dangerous section of Chicago’s South Side now known as O Block. He never read a newspaper, watched the news on television or listened to it on the radio.

“I figured it had nothing to do with me,” he said.

It was like that for him in his daily life, too. He woke up, he said, to the violence in the city’s streets, to people who were hungry and had hard lives, to the police who were charged with keeping the community safe but didn’t seem to do so. In his mind, there was nothing he could do about it; powerless, he floated through life, surviving rather than living.

Then, last year, Christian enrolled in Leo High School’s semester-long news literacy class, which prepares students in the all-boys Catholic school to work on the school newspaper. Bill Figel, a co-teacher, weaves the News Literacy Project’s original curriculum into the class.

Soon, Christian began reading the Chicago Tribune every day and tackling daily news-related assignments. He began thinking about such things as media coverage of shootings in Chicago, Sean Penn’s Rolling Stone interview with a fugitive Mexican drug lord, and the presidential election. Students in the class were tweeting questions to a Chicago Tribune columnist — and were surprised when he tweeted back.

Christian was also learning what to believe and what not to believe by looking for bylines, statistics and other verifiable information, and by checking his own biases. He was getting the gist of it, he said. “But it was baby steps for me.”

Even so, Figel said, “he showed a real strength and ability to take a stand. … One could sense enlightenment driving Chris as he realized he was finding himself in his expression of the issues.”

Then one day Figel asked the students to put themselves in a story: What if you were a person in a position of power? What would you want written about you? What if something happened to you, an everyday Joe? What would be said?

Something in that clicked for Christian. News did matter. News was now about, and for, him. “We are the ones who live here,” he said. “We matter as citizens.”

Earlier this year, Christian, now 18, recalled his experience in the news literacy class during an NLP VIP breakfast featuring ESPN’s Michael Wilbon. Tall and thin, like a yard-long bean in a pressed shirt and striped tie, he spoke softly — yet with impressive poise and confidence — about his newfound sense of engagement and empowerment.

“This class has definitely changed my life,” Christian said. “We prioritize news literacy over all else. The newspaper is considered to be our Holy Grail.”

Today Knight Foundation is announcing $225,000 in support for the expansion of the News Literacy Project’s Checkology™ virtual classroom in the Knight communities of Charlotte, North Carolina; Detroit; Lexington, Kentucky; Miami; and Philadelphia.

Father Joseph Parkes, S.J., the founding president of NLP partner school Cristo Rey New York High School, calls news literacy "one of the most important needs in the country."

Staying informed and engaged is something that Father Joseph Parkes, S.J., the founding president of Cristo Rey New York High School, takes quite seriously.

“I look at the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post every day,” Parkes said. “I email the papers a lot, too, and I’ve written to the public editor of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others.”

According to Parkes, students often lack this kind of critical thinking and civic engagement when they arrive at Cristo Rey, a Roman Catholic college preparatory school in East Harlem.

“They are so inundated with information that I don’t think they have time to figure out what’s nonsense, what’s propaganda and what’s true,” he said. “How do you build up a critical mind?”

Parkes, a warm, energetic man who has served as president of three Catholic high schools during the past 27 years, recognized the need to provide students with the know-how to be smart, active news consumers and better-informed citizens. He welcomed a collaboration with NLP when its president, Alan C. Miller, approached him in 2011.

“It’s one of the most important needs in the country,” Parkes said. “If you really want to be an active citizen, you have an obligation to begin to inform yourself about what’s going on.”

The collaboration has evolved into one of the News Literacy Project’s strongest partnerships. Dozens of students, who come from low-income communities throughout New York City and pay tuition through a work-study program, are taught NLP’s core curriculum each year in their senior English class. Moreover, news literacy now informs many elements of the school’s senior English course.

“They are skills that can remain with them forever. They learn how to critically read a news article or a television news story,” Parkes said, “and that’s a huge plus.”

NLP units include lessons delivered by journalist fellows — including David Gonzalez and Andrea Elliott of The New York Times, Ron Claiborne of ABC News and Lisa Fleisher of The Wall Street Journal — who Parkes believes inspire students.

“If someone comes in from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to speak to them, they consider that an honor,” Parkes said. “That’s important to them.”

As a board member of Cristo Rey’s national network of 30 schools, Parkes has helped introduce NLP to Cristo Rey schools in Takoma Park, Maryland, and Houston. He has also participated in events to promote NLP’s mission in New York and elsewhere, including the national News Literacy Summit 2014 in Chicago.

In the process, he has become an ardent advocate for news literacy education. “It’s invaluable in making our students citizens of the world,” he said.