NLP to be founding participant in News Integrity Initiative

Today marks a milestone for the News Literacy Project. We’ve been offered an exciting opportunity to amplify and expand our work to give facts a fighting chance.

We’re honored to be a founding participant in the News Integrity Initiative, a global consortium “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

Based at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, the Initiative is launching with $14 million in funding from tech industry leaders, academic institutions, nonprofits and other organizations. It will support applied research and projects and convene meetings with industry experts to advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world and to enhance the public conversation.

I will be part of today’s announcement, which will be broadcast at 4 p.m. ET via Facebook Live on the CUNY Journalism School’s Facebook page. NLP is one of 19 initial participants in the News Integrity Initiative — and is the only one focused primarily on news literacy.

NLP has been a national pioneer in the field of news literacy for nine years, providing innovative lessons and resources that give middle school and high school students the tools to know what to believe in today’s challenging information landscape.

In the aftermath of the bitterly divisive 2016 presidential campaign, which featured daily assaults on truth and partisan attacks on the news media, the world learned hard lessons about the prevalence and power of online hoaxes and conspiracy theories.

For us, the need to extend news literacy to the general population suddenly took on far greater urgency, since the bedrock of a healthy democracy is an informed and engaged electorate. Our ultimate goal is to strengthen the grass roots of our country’s democracy by giving people of all ages, and not just teenagers, the ability to know what news and information to trust, share and act on.

Even as our scope expands, we remain committed to continuing to serve our core community with our Checkology® virtual classroom, which is rapidly growing nationally and worldwide.

We are already working with Facebook on an ambitious public service advertising campaign that will be released on the platform this spring. At this crucial moment for the U.S. and the world, we’re excited by the prospect of being part of this broad and impressive coalition to improve news literacy on a global scale.