Columbia Journalism Review features the News Literacy Project

The report, “Leap of Faith,” opens with the initial visit of an NLP journalist fellow, David Gonzalez of The New York Times, to a classroom at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, New York. It discusses NLP in the context of an emerging news literacy effort that writer Megan Garber says “has the potential to transform itself from the cause of a committed few into a powerful national movement.”

Amid journalism’s current crisis, Garber asserts, the industry “has a marked opportunity to reinvent itself and its role in the community.” She urges news organizations “to make a point of seeking out young people — and of explaining to them what they do, and perhaps even more importantly, why they do it. News literacy offers news organizations the opportunity to essentially re-brand themselves.”

News literacy, says journalism professor David T.Z. Mindich, can “allow journalists to be advocates for democracy.”

Garber attended NLP classes in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as the first national news literacy conference at Stony Brook University in March. Among those featured in the article are NLP chair Vivian Schiller, executive director Alan C. Miller and board member Howard Schneider, founder of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook.

Published by Columbia University’s journalism school, CJR is widely read and well-respected by journalists and journalism instructors nationwide.