Alan Miller on the set of WPIX 11

A great week, thanks to you!

Updates


With our partner, The E.W. Scripps Company, we at the News Literacy Project are grateful to all of the educators, students, journalists and members of the public who joined us for National News Literacy Week.

We had terrific participation on social media and through Scripps’ local TV stations across the country, and high visibility thanks to donated ad space from news organizations across the country (from a small-town weekly in Rhode Island, The Valley Breeze, to the Los Angeles Times, along with The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Associated Press, NPR and many more). National News Literacy Week was even featured on Nasdaq’s billboards in Times Square!

NNLW advertisements on Nasdaq's billboards

National News Literacy Week, promoted on Nasdaq’s billboards. Darragh Worland / The News Literacy Project

The Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed by our founder and CEO, Alan Miller, that explained the critical need for news literacy. The Houston Chronicle published an op-ed by Miller and Adam Symson, Scripps’ president and CEO, about the importance of sticking to facts. The Roanoke (Virginia) Times shared Miller’s thoughts on why news literacy is vital to democracy. Editors at other news organizations joined in, writing their own editorials and publishing opinion columns in support of news literacy education. They included the San Francisco Chronicle, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,  the Post Bulletin  (Rochester, Minnesota), The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) and The Advocate-Messenger (Danville, Kentucky).

Student reports

On the broadcast and interactive side, National News Literacy Week was featured in promotions on Scripps’ national media brands, including its podcast company, Stitcher, and its multiplatform news network, Newsy. Particularly impressive were the reports that aired on Scripps’ TV stations around the country, co-produced by each station’s journalists and local students.

The students came up with issues that were of concern to them, then worked with the Scripps journalists to put together reports on such teen-focused topics as career training programs, disparities between boys’ and girls’ sports at high schools, and young people’s use of social media, along with broader concerns, such as mental health, climate change in the 2020 election and local cases of missing or murdered indigenous women.

In addition, we featured resources, tips and tools relating to each day’s National News Literacy Week theme (you’ll need to register for our Checkology® virtual classroom as a Basic user to see the lessons):

Maintaining news literacy skills

And while National News Literacy Week may be over, news literacy remains an urgent and persistent need. We encourage you to keep your skills sharp by using some of the tips we shared (click the links to learn more):

And find out just how much you learned during National News Literacy Week by taking this quiz: “How news-literate are you?”

Remember, when you put your news literacy skills to work, you’re no longer part of the misinformation problem. You’re part of the solution.

This item was updated on Feb. 4 with a photo, with links to editorials and columns published in support of National News Literacy Week, and with links to the daily themes.

More Updates

Watch seventh graders share news literacy skills at a holiday dinner table

The holidays are a time to be together with loved ones, but conversations can get contentious if the topic turns to falsehoods circulating on social media or elsewhere. Luckily, the seventh-grade students at North Salem Middle/High School in New York know how to keep the mood civil around the dinner table by relying on news…

NLP in the News