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NLP founder and CEO, Alan Miller, photographed for Washingtonian magazine
Photograph by Jeff Elkins
NLP founder named a Washingtonian of the Year
Photograph by Jeff Elkins
Every year, Washingtonian magazine chooses a handful of local residents “who give their time and talents to make this a better place” and names them “Washingtonians of the Year.”
NLP is proud to announce that Alan C. Miller, our founder and CEO, is a 2020 Washingtonian of the Year honoree. Below is an excerpt from the piece recognizing his achievements.
Origin story
When Pulitzer-winning LA Times reporter Alan Miller conceived of the News Literacy Project in 2006, the media — and the world — was in a different place. Facebook and iPhones were just taking off, phrases like “fake news” and “alternative facts” weren’t mainstream, and the educational field of news literacy didn’t exist. But after speaking to his daughter’s sixth-grade classmates, Miller felt it was essential to teach youth how to be “smart, active consumers of news and information”—a goal that has never felt more urgent.
“I was concerned about how they were evaluating a tsunami of information from sources with varying credibility, accountability, and transparency—and that was on a PC,” says Miller, who launched NLP, a national education nonprofit, from his Bethesda home in 2008.
‘Rigorously nonpartisan’
Those tools have come to fruition in Checkology, a free virtual-learning platform for middle- and high-schoolers that teaches how to discern credible information, bias, and misinformation. Checkology, which like NLP is “rigorously nonpartisan,” has been used by educators in all 50 states and dozens of other countries. By 2022, NLP’s goal is to reach 3 million students annually. The news-literacy mission has become even more dire in the pandemic, when discerning fact from fiction can truly be a matter of life or death.