In both programs, Bloomberg journalists will go into classrooms for presentations that teach students the principles of news literacy and will assist them with multimedia topics on issues that interest them. Both programs, which are funded with grants from Bloomberg, began this month.

In New York City, NLP and Bloomberg will work with students at MS 57/James Weldon Johnson Leadership Academy, a public school serving a large Hispanic student population in East Harlem. The school is in the 93rd percentile of the city’s K-8 public schools.

“We see this partnership as a unique opportunity to enable our journalists to share their skills with New York City youth to create a more informed citizenship,” said Karen Toulon, Bloomberg’s New York bureau chief, who is leading the program in New York.

In Washington, the partner school is E. L. Haynes Public Charter School, which is widely recognized for outstanding student achievement and impact on education. In 2012, for the second year in a row, the D.C. Public Charter School Board awarded E.L. Haynes Tier 1 status on its Performance Management Framework based on student progress over time, student achievement, and attendance and re-enrollment rates. In 2011, the CityBridge Foundation awarded E.L. Haynes its first-ever Strong Schools Award for its unwavering focus on student achievement and its broader impact on public education.

Bloomberg is one of the News Literacy Project’s 23 participating news organizations. In addition to encouraging its employees to volunteer as journalist fellows, the company has provided NLP with grants for general support the past two years and joined NLP in co-sponsoring a forum on presidential debates at Georgetown University in October. More than three dozen Bloomberg reporters and editors in New York and Washington have enlisted as NLP journalist fellows.

NLP’s pilot unit with E.L. Haynes, completed in September 2011, was featured in a report on PBS NewsHour three months later.

The addition of Bloomberg as a partner will build on the school’s previous experience with NLP and provide a greater in-depth experience for the students, Jennifer Niles, the founder and head of school, said at a kickoff event for the program on Jan. 23.

“We are really excited” about the prospect of working with Bloomberg, she told about three dozen students, parents, school administrators and NLP staff. “It’s a special opportunity.”

Cesca Antonelli, Bloomberg’s Washington bureau chief, told the students that the news organization welcomed the chance to create a more skeptical and informed public and to “help you think about the news and see how we think about the news.”

Fifteen students in the 8th and 9th grades will participate in the 16-week program. They will study basic news literacy concepts with 8th-grade literacy teacher Anna Salzberg; Maureen Freeman, the Washington regional coordinator for NLP; and the Bloomberg journalists before embarking on a multimedia project on a topic of their choice.

The students, who were selected for the program through a competitive process, will visit Bloomberg’s Washington bureau twice; on the second visit, they will present their final project. All of the students have been introduced to some basic news literacy concepts; the three 9th-graders participated in NLP’s pilot unit last year.

E. L. Haynes is the first year-round public school in Washington. Its students come from every ward in the city; 51% are black, 35% are Hispanic, 9% are white and 5% are Asian and other ethnicities. Sixty-eight percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches; 23% do not speak English as their native language.

The student body at MS 57 in New York is also diverse: 69% are Hispanic, 25% are black, 3% are Asian and 2% are white. Of the school’s almost 800 students, 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

At MS 57, a group of about 20 6th-grade students will work with a team of Bloomberg journalists in an after-school class meeting twice weekly to create a reporting project on a topic of their choice. Students will learn the core concepts of journalism, as well as how to conduct interviews, research and report stories, gather video, photos and audio in the field and publish their content on the Internet.

The students will visit Bloomberg’s New York City headquarters twice and will present their final projects on the second visit. Each student will be paired with a Bloomberg journalist as an online mentor.

“These are much-needed skills,” said MS 57 assistant principal Jonathan Lee. “In this day and age, students need to learn to communicate through multimedia. With this program our kids will get to experience a holistic approach to academics—they will start to see how they can use their math, reading and writing skills, how academics translate to daily life.”

The event, co-sponsored by The Washington Post, will be held in the Whitman auditorium at 7100 Whittier Ave. in Bethesda, Maryland. Tickets — $15 for adults and $10 for senior citizens and high school and college students — can be ordered by clicking here [ticket sales are now closed].

This is the third year NLP has presented programs at Whitman about politics, public policy and the press. Last year’s event, which drew an audience of more than 900, featured columnists David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post and moderator Jessica Yellin of CNN discussing “Demosclerosis: The Challenge of Moving America Forward in a Hyper-Partisan Age.”

Her column underscores the critical need for the public to seek out credible information to assure the health of America’s democracy.

“Without a well-informed public, you get what we have: a culture that rewards ignorance and treats discourse as a blood sport,” Parker wrote. “News literacy programs provide some hope at least for a more sophisticated consumer. It’s a modest start, but learning to read critically is no less important than reading itself.”

This year, NLP worked with three sections of 10th-graders studying human rights and genocide. Dina Temple-Raston, a reporter for NPR and a member of NLP’s New York advisory committee, spoke to the students about the difference between propaganda and news, illustrating how radio broadcasts were used in Rwanda to incite genocide. She then moderated an interview via Skype between the students and a Tutsi genocide survivor now living in San Francisco.

The SchoolBook story illustrates how NLP’s teaching units fit into diverse programs and curriculums, and can be customized for use to help teachers inspire their students and achieve their goals.

Each session is designed to equip students with essential critical-thinking skills needed to sort fact from fiction as both consumers and producers of news and information.  They will combine some of the projects most successful lessons and classroom presentations by experienced journalists from The Washington Post, all volunteer fellows with the News Literacy Project.

The workshops will focus on how to discern verified, credible information from raw information, opinion and misinformation and will deal with such topics as viral email, YouTube and investigative reporting.

Participating Washington Post reporters will include national reporter Tom Hamburger, features writer DeNeen Brown and pop music critic Chris Richards.  The workshops will be run by the staff of the News Literacy Project.

High school students from the Washington, D.C., area can register to attend one Saturday workshop on either June 23, July 14 or Aug. 4.  Each session covers similar content.

They are held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at The Washington Post, located at 1150 15th St. NW in Washington, a few blocks east of the Farragut North Metro station.  Light refreshments will be served.

The workshops are free and are each limited to 30 students.  They are offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.

For more information or to register, contact:

Jaye P. Linnen, The Washington Post
[email protected]
202-334-4917

Maureen Freeman, The News Literacy Project
[email protected]

Parker writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture that is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group to more than 450 newspapers. The Post is one of 21 news organizations that participate in the News Literacy Project.

In 2010, Parker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for what the judges described as her “perceptive, often witty columns on an array of political and moral issues, gracefully sharing the experiences and values that lead her to unpredictable conclusions.”

She also writes for Newsweek and USA Today and is a CNN contributor and a frequent guest on the Sunday morning news shows. Her book, Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care, was published in 2008.

In recent months, Parker has written on subjects that reflect the need for news literacy. In a column last month that extolled the virtues of moderation in politics, she lamented the tone of public discourse in which “dispassion and facts give way to heat and opinion.”

In an April 11 column focusing on a false allegation about South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley that circulated in both the blogosphere and some mainstream media outlets, Parker wrote, “Integrity of information is the one thing newspapers can promise readers that other, new media can’t deliver with the same consistency.

“It isn’t only a matter of pride or even of survival of newspapers, in which I obviously have a personal interest,” she wrote. “Ultimately, it is a matter of helping protect freedoms that will become diminished as a less-informed citizenry surrenders responsibility to titillation—and slouches inevitably toward idiocracy.”

NLP is now working with 35 teachers in 21 middle schools and high schools in New York City, Chicago, Washington and Bethesda, Maryland, to reach well over 2,000 students this school year. This included expansion into the District of Columbia in September. Six schools in New York, four in Chicago, two in Washington and one in Bethesda joined NLP in 2011.

Twenty-one news organizations and nearly 200 seasoned journalists are enrolled with NLP as participants. The Wall Street Journal, Univision, the Chicago Sun-Times and WTOP radio in Washington joined the ranks this past year. The Online News Association endorsed NLP as well.

NLP also adopted exciting innovations to its model in the past year.

It is working with the American Library Association to produce a series of news media watchdog workshops for high school students focused on the 2012 presidential election. The first one was held on Nov. 19 in Des Moines, Iowa – the state that kicks off the nominating contest with Republican caucuses in early January. Other sessions are planned for Chicago, Baltimore and Des Moines in the summer of 2012.

In Chicago, NLP worked with the Chicago Public Library, the After School Matters program and the Parks District to produce workshops and conduct news literacy training. In Washington, it helped The Washington Post relaunch its Young Journalists Development Program with two summer workshops for area high school students.

In New York and Chicago, NLP increasingly took students to the journalists in their newsrooms as well as bringing journalists to the students’ classrooms. More than 170 students participating in the project made 10 field trips to newsrooms in the two cities in 2011.

They included visits to 60 Minutes in New York to meet Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, and correspondent Lesley Stahl; to the NBC News studio to meet with three senior executives and watch a taping of the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from the studio control room; and to ABC News to watch a production of the weekend edition of Good Morning America.

In Chicago, students made two visits to the Chicago Tribune; two visits to the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press for a day of news literacy and journalism workshops; two visits to the South Side bureau of WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station; and a visit to the Chicago Sun-Times.

NLP also continued its practice of holding a series of public events. In Washington, it kicked off its expansion into the District of Columbia with an event at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School featuring Gwen Ifill of PBS and FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.

In October, NLP held its second annual Fall Forum at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda with an event featuring columnists David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post and Jessica Yellin of CNN. The three journalists discussed “Demosclerosis: The Challenge of Moving America Forward in a Hyper-Partisan Age” before an audience of 900 adults and students.

On Nov. 1, NLP and Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago sponsored a symposium on “Covering Religion: How to Balance Facts and Faith in the Search for Truth.” Manya Brachear, a religion reporter for the Chicago Tribune; Odette Yousef, a reporter for WBEZ radio; and Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of the Religion News Service, were the panelists and Art Norman of NBC 5 served as moderator. About 300 students and adults attended.

NLP’s New York advisory committee continued its occasional breakfast series with high-profile journalists. In March, the group’s members met at 60 Minutes with Jeff Fager and correspondent Scott Pelley. In June, they had breakfast at The New York Times with Mark Halperin of Time magazine. The year’s final session, with NBC Nightly News anchor and managing editor Brian Williams and other NBC executives, was held at NBC News in December.

The year also marked a major milestone in NLP’s governance: In May, it became an independent 501(c)(3) after operating for the previous 2½ years with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies as its fiscal agent. NLP’s pro bono law firm, Dickstein Shapiro LLP, was extraordinarily helpful with the process of obtaining approval from the Internal Revenue Service.

Later in the year, Don Wycliff, the former editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune and now the Distinguished Journalist in Residence at the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago, joined the board. NLP also added additional members to its engaged advisory committees in New York, Chicago and Washington.

In June, a report by the Federal Communications Commission, The Information Needs of Communities, touted NLP as stepping into an “educational breach.”

It continued to receive highly favorable local and national media coverage. In January, the Chicago program was spotlighted in an article in the Chicago Tribune. In December, PBS NewsHour featured an in-depth report that focused on the program in Washington and Bethesda.

NLP and its partners are grateful for generous support that it has received from foundations, corporations and individuals. Major sponsors in 2011 were the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and Qualcomm, the lead sponsor of NLP’s expansion into Washington.

Students participating in the project visited four newsrooms in New York and Chicago in the past two months, bringing the total number of such field trips in the two cities to 10 for 2011.

A group of 14 high school seniors from Cristo Rey New York High School visited 60 Minutes in New York on Dec. 13. The students met with Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes. He discussed the news magazine format and shared a compilation of interviews and reports from the last three years of 60 Minutes.

The group was then joined by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl for a question-and-answer session. Stahl also offered advice to the students — all of whom are producing news articles for their NLP unit final projects — and taught them the importance of structuring a story the way they might tell it to friends or family.

The previous week, 10 high school juniors from the Cinema School in the Bronx visited the NBC News studios in New York. The students, members of the newly formed newspaper club The Reel News, held a question-and-answer session with senior vice president Alexandra Wallace and two senior producers, Robert Dembo and Marian Porges. The students also watched a taping of the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from the studio control room and were given a tour.

In Chicago, 18 student journalists from Northside College Preparatory High School’s journalism class visited the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press on Nov. 1 for a day of news literacy and journalism workshops. The class, which also comprises the staff of the school newspaper, The HoofBeat, received news literacy lessons from David Scott, the AP’s central region editor, and Anna Johnson, assistant central editor. The group was then joined by editors Tom McCarthy and Tim Sundheim for a discussion about news selection, ethics and the Freedom of Information Act.

This is the second year that the News Literacy Project has arranged a field trip to the AP bureau for Northside student journalists.

A journalism class from the Chicago Military Academy in Bronzeville visited the Chicago Sun-Times on Nov. 16. This group of 22, which produces the Bronzeville Star, had two sessions with Sun-Times journalists. The first, with investigative reporter Chris Fusco, explored the role that his form of journalism plays in citizens’ daily lives. Fusco walked the students through some of his recent reporting, including an extensive investigation of handicapped parking placard fraud in Chicago. Metro editor Paul Saltzman created a display highlighting 10 significant stories from his career, both at the Sun-Times and at The Miami Herald, and discussed the outcomes of some of them.

Five other NLP student groups visited news organizations earlier in the year. In March, NLP students in Chicago spent time at The Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and the South Side bureau of public radio station WBEZ. That same month, an NLP group in New York visited ABC News to watch a production of the weekend edition of Good Morning America. In July, a group of students in a Chicago Park District summer program visited the South Side bureau of WBEZ, and in August a group of 7th-graders from Mt. Vernon Elementary School visited the Chicago Tribune.

Overall, the News Literacy Project brought more than 170 students — more than half of them student journalists — into professional newsrooms in 2011. These opportunities for lessons, tours and discussions about journalism in the field are a compelling way to advance NLP’s mission. The project looks forward to expanding such opportunities in 2012 through the use of “virtual” visits online as well as in-person visits.

In the film, an immigrant woman brings evidence about her daughter’s murder to the local newspaper and not to the police, prompting the paper’s managing editor (Bogart) to ask why she would do such a thing. She responds, “I no know police. I know The Day.”

Her explanation speaks to a view of the newspaper as a critical medium that “raises literacy, records history, binds the community and makes democracy possible,” Schroth writes.

Today, Schroth acknowledges, social media is said to fill that void, but he wonders whether television, Facebook and Twitter “can carry the load.”

And that, says Schroth, is where the News Literacy Project comes in, with its emphasis on the relationship between the news and democracy.

One might even argue that NLP helps sustain an industry endangered not just today, but also in Bogie’s time.

“As Bogart’s character says, ‘The free press is like a free life — always in danger,’” writes Schroth.

Well put, Bogie. Here’s looking at you!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Oct. 14, 2011

Contact:

Maureen Freeman
[email protected]

Josh Wozman, 202-530-4608
[email protected]

Columnists David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post will be the featured speakers at the News Literacy Project’s second annual Fall Forum, a series focusing on politics, public policy and the press.

The program begins at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at Walt Whitman High School, 7100 Whittier Blvd., Bethesda, Maryland.

Brooks and Dionne will discuss “Demosclerosis: The Challenge of Moving America Forward in a Hyper-Partisan Age.” Jessica Yellin, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, will be the moderator of the event.

The News Literacy Project initiated the Fall Forum at Whitman in 2010 with three events featuring prominent journalists and other public figures. The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN are among 20 news organizations that are participating in the project, which is active at Whitman, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., as well as schools in New York City and Chicago.

The Washington Post and Qualcomm Incorporated are the sponsors of this year’s event. Qualcomm, the world leader in 3G and next-generation mobile technologies, is also the lead sponsor of the project’s programs in Washington and Bethesda. Qualcomm believes that mobile technology provides an opportunity to improve and transform the educational experience of students worldwide.

Brooks has been an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 2003. He is also a commentator on PBS NewsHour and makes frequent appearances on NPR and other broadcast outlets. His most recent book is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011).

Dionne is a columnist at The Washington Post, where he writes about national policy and politics. A frequent commentator on NPR, MSNBC and other broadcast outlets, he is also a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dionne joined the Post as a political reporter in 1990.

Yellin is CNN’s chief White House correspondent, a position she has held since June 2011. She joined CNN as a Capitol Hill reporter in August 2007 and in January 2009 was named a national political correspondent, reporting on politics, policy and culture for programs that included The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and John King USA.

The News Literacy Project, which is based in Bethesda, brings seasoned journalists into middle school and high school classrooms, where they give students the critical-thinking tools to appreciate the value of quality news coverage and to encourage them to consume and create credible information across all media and platforms.

The project is headed by Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter with the Los Angeles Times. The board is chaired by John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun. Leslie Hill, a former member of the Dow Jones board, is the vice chair.

The News Literacy Project is working with at least 35 English, government, history and humanities teachers to reach more than 2,000 students. It is in its fourth year at Whitman and its second year at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

More than 185 journalists are listed in its online directory, including broadcast correspondents, authors of best-selling books and winners of journalism’s highest honors. Since 2009, nearly 100 journalist fellows have made more than 250 presentations in classrooms, conferences, workshops and other programs.

The Charles H. Revson Foundation and the McCormick Foundation are the project’s largest funders. For more information about the News Literacy Project, go to www.thenewsliteracyproject.org.

Tickets for the event are $15 (adults) or $10 (senior citizens and middle school, high school and college students). They can be purchased in advance at www.thenewsliteracyproject.org. Tickets will also be available at the box office, starting at 6:30 p.m., the night of the event.

Qualcomm is the registered trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated.

HBO is sponsoring the school’s participation, marking the first such corporate sponsorship of a school in New York. It will be NLP’s seventh partner in New York City this school year.

Founded in 1984 by Brother Brian Carty and located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, De La Salle Academy welcomes students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades from all five boroughs of New York City. The school’s admission policy is need-blind; 61 percent of students are from families with incomes of $50,000 or less. Each year, the school raises more than 90 percent of its annual budget from sources other than tuition.

De La Salle is committed to racial and religious diversity: 36 percent of its students are Latino, 21 percent are African-American, 26 percent are Asian-American, 7 percent are Caucasian and 9 percent are multiracial. Catholics make up 43 percent of the student body, and 32 percent are Protestant. One-fifth of students come from other faiths, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, while 5 percent practice no faith.

“At De La Salle Academy, we do our utmost every day to enrich the students entrusted to our care with exceptional opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. We teach to both the head and the heart,” Brother Brian said.

“Character counts. We are excited and grateful that our students will be able to participate in the rich program offered by the News Literacy Project. By enhancing our students’ habits of mind as they sort through all the information available to them in our digital age, we are supporting them as they dream, learn, strive and achieve to become leaders in the 21st century.”

De La Salle Academy will implement NLP units as a semester-long elective course and an after-school program, beginning in January 2012.

The video showcases the program’s impact in partner schools in the project’s three regions.  The video is narrated by ABC News anchor and correspondent Ron Claiborne, an active NLP journalist fellow. His portion of the video was shot on the set of ABC’s weekend edition of Good Morning America.

Featured journalists include Matea Gold of the Los Angeles Times and Ari Shapiro of NPR. The video also includes excerpts from interviews with Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and president, and with principals, teachers and students from partner schools in Chicago, New York City and Bethesda, Maryland.

“How do you know that?” she told the students to ask of any source of information. “What do you base that on? What is the expertise you bring to that?”

Also participating in the event, which was attended by about 50 eighth-grade students taking the NLP unit and more than 40 guests, were Federal Communications Commission member Michael J. Copps; Greg Farmer, vice president for government affairs at Qualcomm Inc.; Jennifer Niles, E.L. Haynes’ founder and head of school; and Alan C. Miller, the News Literacy Project’s president and founder.

“The News Literacy Project at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School is a big deal — I think it’s a very big deal,” Copps said. “We need to be a news-literate people. Democracy’s premise is a well-informed citizenry.

“We can’t govern ourselves without good news and information,” he said, adding: “We need to be able differentiate fact from opinion, and we need to be able to distinguish trustworthy information from untrustworthy.”

Farmer said that Qualcomm, the world leader in 3G and next-generation mobile technologies, has become the lead sponsor of the News Literacy Project’s expansion into the nation’s capital as part of the San Diego-based company’s longstanding commitment to education.

“We clearly see that education is an issue of importance to our business, as well as the country,” Farmer said. “By providing students with the tools they need to succeed, we are educating a workforce that is prepared, can adapt as new jobs evolve and can compete in the global economy.”

NLP brings seasoned journalists into middle school and high school classrooms, where they give students the critical-thinking tools to appreciate the value of quality news coverage and to encourage them to consume and create credible information across all media and platforms.

At E.L. Haynes, one of Washington’s most highly regarded charter schools, NLP is working with teacher Eliza Ford to introduce the project’s original curriculum to two 8th-grade classes.

Niles said Tuesday that NLP supports E.L. Haynes’ mission, which is “to make sure that each student can go to the college of their choice and be life-long learners so they can change the institutions in the U.S. … [and] can be incredible advocates for social justice in the world.”

Ifill is the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour. She spoke to the students and guests Tuesday about journalism and her career and then responded to questions.

“The importance of news literacy is being able to know the difference between someone who already has an opinion, someone who has already reached a conclusion, and someone who is trying to give you the information to form your own conclusion,” she said.

She said she decided to join the News Literacy Project’s board because NLP represents an opportunity to build an appreciation and demand for quality journalism amid the rapidly changing media landscape.

“If we can create another generation of young people who have expectations for what journalism can be … we can say we didn’t just let it slip out of our hands,” Ifill said.

Jessica Yellin, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, will be the moderator of the event, which is the News Literacy Project’s second annual Fall Forum focusing on politics, public policy and the press.

The News Literacy Project is active at Whitman, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., and schools in New York City and Chicago.

Walt Whitman is located at 7100 Whittier Boulevard in Bethesda. The Washington Post and Qualcomm Inc. are sponsors of this year’s event.

Tickets are $15 per adult and $10 per senior citizen and middle school, high school and college students. Online advance ticket purchases will be available beginning Sept. 12 at  www.thenewsliteracyproject.org. Tickets will also be available at the box office, starting at 6:30 p.m., on Oct. 19. All tickets ordered after Oct. 12 will have to be picked up at the box office. On the night of the event, cash and checks are preferred.

Advanced ticket sales for the event have ended. Tickets will still be available at the box office starting at 6:30 p.m.

The report, “News Literacy Project Trains Young People to be Skeptical Media Consumers,” featured NLP’s work with 8th-grade students at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., and students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. It showed teachers using the curriculum at Whitman, a journalist’s presentation at E.L. Haynes, and student projects.

It also included a video excerpt from a speech by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps in which he called for the development of a national online news literacy curriculum. “This can be a powerful antidote to the dumbing-down of our civic dialogue that has taken place,” he said.

Jennifer Niles, the founder and head of E.L. Haynes, said in the report that the benefits of the News Literacy Project’s curriculum extend beyond news literacy.

It  “would fit into middle-school curriculum across the country and have a huge focus on nonfiction reaching and writing, which we now understand are so much more central to making sure that our kids are going to be prepared for college, but also competitive in the workplace,” she said. “This fits perfectly.”

NLP’s founder and president, Alan C. Miller, said in the report that if young people don’t understand and appreciate quality journalism, the demand for it may cease to exist.

The News Literacy Project, which started its first pilot projects in three schools in 2009, is now operating in 21 middle schools and high schools in New York City and Chicago as well as in Washington and Bethesda. It will reach more than 2,000 students this year.

“Our goal should be that every American possesses the skills to discern news from infotainment, fact from opinion, and trustworthy information sources from untrustworthy,” Copps told publishers and editors of community publications attending the National Newspaper Association’s annual Government Affairs Conference in Washington, D.C.

“This is not an inconsequential challenge,” he said. “In an era when facts are scarce and opinions are abundant, it’s tough slogging to make sense of the barrage of information coming at us. For some, the easiest route is to pick the opinion narrative that best suits their ideologies, read nothing else, and just shout it from the rooftop.”

Copps then added, “Happily, there is good work being done on the literacy front. One example is the News Literacy Project that pairs secondary school students with active journalists who instill such skills as determining veracity, quantifying bias, and identifying the level of accountability.

“As its founder, Alan Miller, has said of the students he has encountered, `Most view all the information that appears on their screen as created equal.’ The Carnegie-Knight report ‘Young People and News’ also came to the conclusion that the respondents were ‘ill-equipped to process the hard news stories they encounter.’ There are other organizations and academics working on this issue, too. What we need is a way to get it to scale quickly,” he said.

The NNA’s stated mission is “to protect, promote and enhance America’s community newspapers,” which “inform, educate and entertain nearly 150 million readers every week.”

The sessions will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 16, and Saturday, Aug. 6. Students should register for only one session; each will cover similar ground.

The sessions will combine some of NLP’s most successful classroom lessons and presentations from experienced NLP journalist fellows from the Post, the Los Angeles Times and National Journal. The workshops will focus on how to discern verified, credible information from raw information, opinion and misinformation and will deal with such topics as viral email, YouTube and investigative reporting. They will be led by News Literacy Project staff as well as the journalists.

The journalists who are expected to participate are James Grimaldi and DeNeen Brown of The Post, Matea Gold of the Los Angeles Times and Kathy Kiely of National Journal. All are volunteer fellows with the News Literacy Project.

About 30 students from the Washington area and around the country will participate in each workshop. They are being offered for free on a first-come, first-serve basis. To register, contact Alan Miller at [email protected] or Jaye Linnen at [email protected]. The Post is located at 1150 15th St. NW in Washington, D.C.

Refreshments for the event are being donated by Spring Mill Bread Co. and Honest Tea, both of Bethesda, Maryland.

Work done by NLP students and interviews with students who have completed the NLP unit in New York City, Chicago and Bethesda, Maryland, will be featured on the film’s social action campaign website.

A video about the News Literacy Project will be included as a DVD extra when the Page One DVD is released in the fall. The video, produced by NLP, focuses on NLP’s impact on students in its three regions in the past three years.

The News Literacy Project was invited to be part of the social action campaign by Participant Media, one of the producers of Page One. Participant has also produced An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for “Superman,” Food Inc., The Soloist and other critically acclaimed films and has created social action campaigns for them as well.

Page One is a behind-the-scenes look at a tumultuous year in the life of media reporters and editors at The New York Times. It follows the journalists as they grapple with challenges as varied as dealing with WikiLeaks and utilizing new platforms such as Twitter and tablet computers, even as their own newspaper struggles to stay vital and solvent amid the upheaval in the media industry.

Participant Media’s social action campaign for Page One will focus on the importance of knowing the original source of the news a person reads, watches, hears and posts online and the difference between original reporting and commentary.

“NLP will provide our students with the critical thinking and analytical skills they need to be successful in college and in life,” said Jennifer C. Niles, E.L. Haynes’ founder and head of school.  “Participation in this project will help E.L. Haynes fulfill our mission.”

That mission is for each student at E.L. Haynes — regardless of race, socioeconomic status or home language — to reach high levels of academic achievement and be prepared to succeed at the college of his or her choice. Washington’s first year-round public school is moving steadily toward this goal through its program based on nationally recognized best practices for advancing student achievement; in four years, the percentage of its students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” in math increased 39% and in reading, 27%.

Founded in 2004, E.L. Haynes has enrolled 600 students from pre-school through eighth grade in the 2010-11 school year. It will add a grade each year and will have its first graduating seniors in the 2014-15 school year.

The school is named for Dr. Euphemia Lofton Haynes, the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics. She was a teacher in the District of Columbia’s school system for 47 years and was the first woman to serve as president of the District of Columbia Board of Education.

In the 2010-11 school year, the News Literacy Project is reaching more than 1,700 students through its work with 30 teachers in 12 schools in Bethesda, New York City and Chicago. It expects to increase its presence in all three regions during the 2011-12 school year.

Though NLP has been responsible for its own fundraising and program operations, Poynter handled the project’s finances, payroll and benefits as its designated 501(c)(3) sponsor. The Tides Center, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, was NLP’s fiscal agent during its initial year.

The Internal Revenue Service approved NLP as an independent nonprofit on March 11. NLP completed its transition with Poynter this in April.

“This is an important milestone in extending the program to more students and teachers and also to more parts of the country,” said NLP board chairman John S. Carroll.

“We’re grateful to the Poynter Institute the invaluable help it’s provided during NLP’s formative years.”

Becoming independent shifts legal and fiscal responsibility to the News Literacy Project’s board, whose members include national leaders in the fields of journalism, education and public relations.

During the process of applying to the IRS and taking other steps necessary to operate independently, NLP has been represented on a pro bono basis by the Washington office of the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro LLP. Attorneys Peter Kadzik, Jonathan Levi and Alicia O’Brien have been especially helpful in guiding the project through this process.

NLP is working with 30 teachers in 12 middle schools and high schools in New York City, Chicago and Bethesda, Maryland, to reach more than 1,700 students this school year. It plans to expand in each region in the 2011-12 school year.

NLP brings seasoned journalists into the schools to give students the tools to discern credible information from rumor, opinion, misinformation and propaganda.

The seven-minute piece captures the project’s impact in schools in New York City, Chicago and Bethesda, Maryland, through interviews with principals and students, photos and excerpts from student projects in each location.

The featured student projects are a mini-documentary, “East Harlem IS,” produced in 2009 by middle school students at East Harlem’s STARS Prep Academy MS 45 with NLP journalists in an after-school program; an audio report, “Peer Pressure,” created in 2010 by middle school students from the Reavis School in Chicago with NLP journalists; and a rap, “Wikipedia Rap,” and a song, “It’s the First Amendment,” written and performed by students from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

The video was first shown at a national conference on news literacy at Stony Brook University on March 17. It was edited by Darragh Worland, NLP’s New York coordinator, who is a multimedia educator and a former broadcast journalist.

The event, which was supported by Skype, brought middle school students in Chicago and high school students in New York together online to connect with NLP fellow Don Bartletti, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times, who presented a lesson from his home in San Diego.

The occasion marked an important milestone in the News Literacy Project’s efforts to develop its use of digital resources as it seeks to expand its model to get to scale.

The event spanned four time zones and both coasts as students at the Facing History School on the West Side of Manhattan and students from Perspectives Middle Academy and the Reavis School on Chicago’s South Side talked with Bartletti in San Diego.

Skype donated webcams, premium vouchers and an ethernet cable to make the event possible and dispatched a video crew to document the landmark occasion in New York.

After participants in each city greeted everyone, Bartletti introduced the students to his work on a series of reports about young migrants traveling from Central America to the Texas border. The series, written by Sonia Nazario and later published as a book titled Enrique’s Journey, required Bartletti to ride on the tops of freight trains with the youths to document their dangerous passage. The core of his lesson dealt with the ethics of photojournalism and the lengths to which photographers and reporters go to accurately capture individual stories and events for their readers and viewers.

“I use my camera as a witness — to show you what the world looks like,” Bartletti told the students in New York and Chicago. “A photograph can sometimes be a story in itself.”

He also emphasized that journalists do not alter or influence their photos in any way.”This is the ethics of photojournalism that I want to impress on you: We, as journalists, want to watch the world happen—we don’t want to make it happen,” Bartletti said. “My photos are true.”

In Chicago, the call was part of a second annual news literacy conference involving two schools participating in the Elev8 Program: the Reavis School and Perspectives Middle Academy. Students and teachers from the schools reflected on their experiences with the NLP unit this spring and shared some of their final news literacy projects.

Perspectives students, who completed the NLP unit as part of their social studies classes in select sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade sections, shared a news literacy rap, an editorial cartoon and a letter to a local newspaper reporter and the reporter’s response. The Reavis students — also a mix of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders — shared a broadcast report on the effect of video games on youth that they produced collaboratively as part of an NLP-supported after-school program.

In New York, about 20 ninth-, 10th- and 12th-grade students gathered at Facing History School for the Skype event. The ninth- and 10th-grade students prepared for the call with a one-day lesson on immigration and also read the award-winning series in the Los Angeles Times. As part of their curriculum, the students read excerpts from Enrique’s Journey during a unit on immigration. The Skype event was a rare opportunity for the students to hear directly from the journalist whose work they had studied.

“It was a wonderful experience for me and my students,” said Facing History teacher Carolyn Casale.

His topic was “Teaching the Next Generation How to Know What to Believe in a Digital World.”

While at Bemidji, Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, also led student workshops on investigative reporting and news literacy.

“I have received nothing but positive feedback from students, faculty and administrators,” said Carla Norris-Raynbird, sociology program coordinator for the Center for Environmental, Earth and Space Studies, Economics and Sociology at Bemidji and the conference organizer. “I cannot recall a speaker who has had this kind of effect on so many … and at so many different levels.”

Miller, other NLP staff members and the project’s journalist fellows are available for speaking engagements at colleges, universities, secondary schools and other venues. Topics they can address include NLP’s four pillars:

• Why news matters.

• The importance of the First Amendment and a free media in a democracy.

• How to know what to believe.

• The challenges and opportunities created by the Internet and digital media.

AOL sets aside space on its homepage daily for a vetted charity or nonprofit that offers a message with national appeal.

The NLP cause module will expose the project’s mission to a large number of visitors to AOL.com and enable them to make online donations. The cause module averages between 4,000 and 7,000 clicks a day, according to AOL.

The NLP cause module will run for 24 hours with the project’s logo, a donation link and a link to our web page.

“We are honored to partner with the News Literacy Project and leverage our world-class Univision News organization to help students across the country understand the importance and value of news consumption in their educational development,” said Isaac Lee, Univision’s president of news. “This collaboration extends our mission of informing, entertaining and empowering our community.”

The company’s assets include Univision Network, the most-watched Spanish-language broadcast television network in the U.S.; TeleFutura Network, a general-interest Spanish-language broadcast television network; Galavisión, the country’s leading Spanish-language cable network; Univision Local Media, which owns and/or operates 62 television stations and 70 radio stations in major U.S. Hispanic markets and Puerto Rico; and Univision Interactive Media, which includes Univision.com, the leading Spanish-language Internet destination in the U.S.

Univision is the 20th news organization to join the News Literacy Project. The others are The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica, Slate, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Bloomberg, Reuters, the Chicago Sun-Times and WTOP radio.

More than 175 journalists have enrolled in NLP’s online directory. These journalist fellows have made presentations in numerous classrooms, worked with students on multimedia projects in extended-day and after-school programs, and helped produce NLP’s video reports. They also have been featured at special events.

NLP is working with 28 teachers and more than 1,700 students in 12 schools in New York City, Chicago, and Bethesda, Maryland, during the 2010-11 school year.

“In this new media age, the old, basic tenets of journalism are as important as ever,” said Mike McMearty, news director of WTOP. “If the News Literacy Project can instill the values of objective, fact-based journalism into the minds of our young students, then the staff at WTOP Radio can only stand and applaud the effort.”

WTOP (103.5 FM in the Washington area) joins The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica, Slate, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Bloomberg, Reuters and the Chicago Sun-Times as a participating news organization.

More than 175 journalists have enrolled in NLP’s online directory. These journalist fellows have made presentations in numerous classrooms, worked with students on multimedia projects in extended-day and after-school programs, and helped produce NLP’s video reports. They also have been featured at special events.

NLP is working with 28 teachers and more than 1,700 students in 12 schools in New York City, Chicago, and Bethesda, Maryland, during the 2010-11 school year.

The series of lectures, workshops and discussions was organized by the News Literacy Project and two of its volunteer journalists on the AP staff, assistant central editor Anna Johnson and central region editor David Scott.

After giving the students a tour of the newsroom, Johnson spoke about her experiences covering the 2009 presidential elections in Iran. She noted that the widespread media blackout while she was there gave her a renewed appreciation of the importance of the First Amendment in the United States.

“Imagine if one day you woke up and your cell phone couldn’t make calls; you could no longer look at news websites and other sites like Facebook on the Internet; you couldn’t text, you couldn’t email, you couldn’t IM. And television stations no longer worked,” said Johnson, recounting what she experienced the day after violence broke out in Tehran.

Students then discussed the power of information and the reasons why the Iranian government — along with those, more recently, in Egypt and Libya — went to such lengths to stop their people from communicating. Johnson closed by reminding students of the importance of credible information to American democracy.

In a second lesson focused on the importance of maintaining standards in a competitive breaking news environment, David Scott explained that even though the concept of reporting is simple (“Talk to people, write down what they say, and tell others”), the process of confirming the details is actually quite complex.

Using the recent shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as an example, Scott reviewed how the story broke and explained why the AP was not among the first news organizations to provide reports on Giffords’ condition.

“It’s all about the information that you get and about asking ‘Who are you? How do you know? Are you in a position to know?’ and ‘Are you sure?’” Scott said. “In this instance, we weren’t sure, so we waited.”

As a result, the AP was not among those news organizations that initially reported, incorrectly, that the Arizona Democrat had died.

After the morning sessions, Northside students and AP journalists chatted over lunch, where student photographers’ questions to multimedia editor Shawn Chen and staff photographer Charles Rex Arbogast about their work led to a spirited conversation about photo permissions and copyright.

In the afternoon, the students attended smaller breakout sessions that targeted specific journalism skills. A group of student section editors and reporters worked with AP editors Chris Sundheim and Tim Jacobs on organizing information and writing solid news reports with effective leads. Sundheim and Jacobs have been serving as editorial advisers to Northside’s student newspaper, The HoofBeat, and during the workshop were able to refer to stories written by the students.

A second breakout session was led by AP videojournalist Robert Ray, who talked about the importance of visual elements in news stories as well as the increasing importance of offering multimedia content.

The final component of the day was a discussion and Q&A session with veteran journalists Tom McCarthy, Hugh Dellios, Sharon Cohen and Michael Tarm. The panel, representing more than 75 years of collective journalism experience, fielded questions on topics as diverse as WikiLeaks, the challenge of breaking in to the business as a young reporter, and the ways the news industry is adjusting to changes brought by the digital age.

After the event, which also was supported by the McCormick Foundation, the response from the journalists in AP’s newsroom — even those who didn’t directly participate in the event — was as positive and animated as that of the students and teachers at Northside. Though the News Literacy Project typically focuses on bringing journalists into the classroom to teach, it turns out that bringing the classroom to journalists is valuable as well.

Whitman was the site of one of NLP’s first three pilot programs, and the project is now in its third year at the school. It will reach more than 350 students in AP government and 11th-grade English classes this school year.

The project also held a series of three public events featuring prominent journalists and other public figures at Whitman last year. More than 400 adults and students attended each of the Fall Forum presentations.

In its “Best of Bethesda” issue, the magazine cites Whitman for its academic record, drama and music programs, and sports teams. The short profile of Whitman includes the following:

“Extracurricular activities also enrich students by exposing them to other viewpoints. One example: The school’s participation in the News Literacy Project has brought in renowned journalists and other media figures for forums with students and parents. ‘To have something like that in our backyard is phenomenal,’ PTSA co-president Robin Rosenblum says.”

Whitney Allgood will be NLP’s first chief of staff. She will oversee day-to-day operations and help to enhance NLP’s curriculum materials, assessment processes and educational model.

Darragh Worland, a journalist and multimedia educator and consultant, is the project’s second New York program coordinator. She will work to expand NLP in New York City schools and with other partners and assist with video and other multimedia initiatives. She succeeds Melissa Nicolardi, NLP’s original New York coordinator, who is returning to school full-time to complete a master’s degree.

“We were fortunate to have a strong pool of applicants, which yielded two outstanding new employees,” said John Carroll, chairman of the NLP board. “I’m confident that Whitney, serving as deputy to the NLP founder, Alan Miller, will help us accelerate our expansion nationally. In New York, Darragh will provide the strong leadership we’ll need to build upon our already substantial presence.”

Whitney and Darragh join NLP president and CEO Alan C. Miller, curriculum director Bob Jervis, program coordinator Kate Ferrall and Chicago program manager Peter Adams. The project is beginning its fourth year.

Before joining NLP, Whitney was the director of assessment and accountability at the District of Columbia’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, where she managed contracts to develop, produce, administer and score state tests for students in all D.C. public and charter schools. She also facilitated the adoption of national Common Core Standards and contributed to the District’s selection by the U.S. Department of Education as a Race to the Top grantee.

She previously spent two years as a fellow with the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. The Gates Foundation-funded project seeks to improve student achievement by promoting evidence-based decision-making. As a fellow, Whitney worked in the Office of Accountability at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Schools.

Whitney began her career as an English and social studies teacher. A graduate of the University of Florida, she has a master’s degree in secondary English education from Rollins College and a doctorate in educational policy from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University.

Darragh worked for six years at NY1 News, a Time Warner-owned cable outlet that covers the city, and then as a senior producer for MSN Money, where she covered the financial crisis, shooting and producing video features for the web. She also freelanced for Fox News for three years as a web news editor and reporter.

Since 2007, Darragh has been an adjunct assistant professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she has worked on the Local East Village blog in partnership with The New York Times. In 2010, ABC News retained her to train its staff in digital video production as part of the organization’s move toward a “digital journalist” model.

She has also designed and taught online and in-class multimedia courses for Mediabistro to help print journalists and communications professionals around the world keep pace with the changing media landscape.

Darragh is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she studied English and drama, and has a master’s degree in journalism from NYU.

Both positions are funded through a three-year grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation in New York City.

McTighe and his colleague Grant Wiggins are the authors of the best-selling Understanding by Design, which seeks to improve student achievement by first planning a curriculum based on the goals of what students need to learn and then building activities to achieve that result.

Their framework also stipulates that “a primary goal of education should be the development and deepening of student understanding. Students reveal their understanding most effectively when they are provided with complex, authentic opportunities to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess.”

McTighe has co-authored 10 books and is well known for his work with thinking skills, having coordinated statewide efforts in Maryland to develop instructional strategies, curriculum models and assessment procedures to improve the quality of student thinking. He has made presentations in 47 states and in 18 countries on five continents.

McTighe has served an informal adviser to the News Literacy Project for the past two years, and NLP’s Classroom Guide was developed using the principles of Understanding by Design. Robert Jervis, the former coordinator of social studies in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and an associate of McTighe’s, is NLP’s curriculum director.