Columbia Journalism Review features the News Literacy Project

Updates


The News Literacy Project is the focus of a 4,300-word cover story on news literacy published in the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

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.

More Updates

News literacy insights on misinformation about immigration protests

Viral rumors and falsehoods have spread in the wake of political protests, particularly recent ones opposing detentions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In a story for Mashable, Peter Adams, Senior Vice president of Research and Design at the News Literacy Project, offered tips for news consumers to avoid getting tricked by false…

NLP in the News

For Education Week, educators share how they teach students to question health influencers

An opinion piece in EducationWeek by two educators from New York featured the News Literacy Project’s District Fellowship program. The commentary described how the program supported their efforts to teach students to critically evaluate health and wellness claims on social media. “By the end, our teens had developed habits of healthy skepticism when scrolling their…

NLP in the News