NLP News

In the article What Really Happened? The Value of a Diverse Media Diet for the nonprofit organization The Field Foundation of Illinois, NLP’s Peter Adams discusses how having a varied news media diet helps news consumers stay reliably informed. “One mistake I think a lot of people make is to say flat out don’t get…

The Washington Post’s education reporter Valerie Strauss revisits a lesson from The Sift about the QAnon conspiracy theory. Her Aug. 25 column A lesson on QAnon for teachers to use in class includes updated information about QAnon’s resurgence in recent days. The next day blogger The Big Education Ape Blogspot  picked up the column.  …

The rights of all Americans to freely assemble and to bring grievances to the government’s doorstep are intrinsic to American democracy and  enshrined in the First Amendment. It’s what we’ve done for generations, perhaps most memorably on Aug. 28, 1963, when 250,000 people descended on Washington, D.C., to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs…

The role of a free press in a democracy was the topic of discussion between NLP founder and CEO Alan Miller and former Library of Congress Publishing Office writer/editor Linda Barrett Osborne during a Poetry & Prose Live event Aug. 20. The virtual discussion, Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of…

On Aug. 20 The School Library Journal included news of NLP expansion efforts: News Literacy Project Creating Educator Network and Offering Free Checkology.

Veteran tech reporter and NLP board member Walt Mossberg discusses whether social media platforms finally understand the dis/misinformation crisis, how guardianship of literacy could be enacted, and why users need to take more responsibility on the Aug. 20 episode of The Open Mind podcast It Didn’t (and Doesn’t) Have to Be This Way.  

In the piece Misinformation in MT Impacting November Election NLP’s Senior Vice President of Education Peter Adams discusses how misinformation can target elections, in this case in Montana, but in any state or nation. “Our religious faith, our patriotism, our care and concern for our community, our desire for justice – and weaponize those in…

John Silva, NLP’s senior director of education and training, talks about Navigating Misinformation in the Time of COVID-19 in Flipboard’s Aug. 19 educators blog. “What we don’t talk about enough is that while we are self-isolating and social distancing, we can’t maintain our social connections. So we are turning to social media to maintain those…

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. It took the women’s suffrage movement decades to achieve that goal, thanks to entrenched discrimination that severely restricted women’s lives. Opposition to women’s suffrage relied on false narratives that seem particularly…

Ebonee Rice, vice president of NLP’s educator network, offers advice in the Mozilla Foundation’s Aug. 17 installment of the Instagram series, Misinfo Monday, on avoiding misinformation. The segment How to Tell Fact from Crap in the Newsfeed includes important tips, such as remembering to “search your feelings” because misinformation likes to prey on emotions. The piece asks: “Have you…

Kris Locker, recipient of NLP’s 2020 Gwen Ifill Student of the Year Award is featured in an article for Florida Gulf Coast University’s news site on Aug. 14. In the piece Journalism grad with knack for news literacy earns national award Locker describes the satisfaction applying what she learned in a news literacy class and…

NLP is now offering its signature e-learning platform Checkology® free to help ease the transition to remote teaching and hybrid learning environments for educators and families. By removing barriers to access, NLP will support educators across the country with essential news literacy lessons at a time of urgent need. Misinformation about COVID-19, the upcoming presidential…

The podcast Inside the Chrysalis, which examines social and psychological concepts through the context of the real world, featured NLP’s Peter Adams  in its Aug. 7 episode. In the segment These Kids Don’t Play: Anxiety About Bias in the Media, host Michelle Quist talks with Peter and mental health professional Maliha Khan.

We are pleased to welcome two esteemed colleagues to NLP’s board of directors: Enrique Acevedo and Whit Ayres. Enrique and Whit bring diverse perspectives, significant professional expertise and a passion for our mission to NLP’s board. Their contributions will help us implement our strategic expansion and solidify our position as the nation’s leading provider of…

NLP’s John Silva gave the presentation What It Means to be News-literate: Key Skills to be Reliably Informed for Long Beach Public Media on Aug. 5. The segment was part of its Citizens Media Series under the theme of Know Your Power: Know Your News.

The sixth of August marks 55 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The legislation outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted in many Southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests and poll taxes. The Act’s goal was to make it impossible to thwart the aims of the 15th Amendment to…

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, presented a webinar on strategies for detecting misinformation for the School Library Journal on Aug. 5 that prompted more questions than Peter could answer during the segment.  SLJ asked him to address some of those in  a Q & A for its website, which he does in…

Gary Vaynerchuk speaks with NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller on the VaynerMedia show “VaynerX Presents: Marketing for the Now.” Miller brings a unique and welcome voice to the segment, speaking on how news literacy skills can help everyone stay reliably informed. “Check your emotions,” Miller says. “If it’s making you angry or fearful…

This Northern Public Radio segment Social Media Has Seen A Rise In Misinformation During COVID-19. How Can You Learn To Spot It? with NLP’s Peter Adams makes important points about the impacts of misinformation. Anyone can experience the negative effects even if they do not share or believe the false content Peter says in the…

The EdSurge Podcast’s July 7 episode Fighting Misinformation in the Age of COVID-19 featured Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education.  Adams stressed the real harm that health misinformation can do. He also shared simple steps anyone can take to stop the spread of falsehoods and hoaxes.

In an op-ed published by the Poynter Institute on July 6, Alan Miller wrote about the distressing loss of hundreds of newspapers across the nation and the impact those losses have on local communities. His piece Give local journalism a fighting chance by creating a demand for it, makes the case that we need to…

This piece is part of a series, presented by our partner SAS, that explores the role of data in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field. (Check out other posts in the series on our Get Smart About COVID-19 Misinformation page.) As the United States enters its…

NLP’s 2020 Educator of the Year Patricia Hunt is featured in the June 25 article, Wakefield High School Teacher Honored for News Literacy Efforts, on ARLNow. The news website covering Arlington, Va., quotes Hunt, a local educator, and NLP CEO and founder Alan C. Miller. It also links to the video of the award presentation,

In recognition of their outstanding achievements during the past school year, the News Literacy Project (NLP) will be announcing the recipients of its 2020 educator, journalist and student of the year awards throughout this week. We recognize the honorees as having distinguished themselves in their commitment to news literacy in their classrooms, in their professions and…

Virginia educator Patricia Hunt is the recipient of NLP’s inaugural Educator of the Year Award for the dedication and innovation she brings to her teaching of news literacy — an essential life skill for the digital age — and for her wider advocacy of news literacy education. Hunt, who teaches 12th grade government courses at…

It’s a good bet that Lyn Millner’s students will be ready to do some serious fact-checking this fall leading up to the presidential election. They’re already experienced at it. Millner, who teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla., created the Vote Vetter project during the midterm elections in 2018. Her News Literacy…

Indira Lakshmanan, senior executive editor at National Geographic and a veteran foreign and national correspondent, is the 2020 recipient of NLP’s John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year Award. Lakshmanan is a frequent TV and radio commentator on journalism and journalistic ethics, served as the first Newmark Chair in Journalism Ethics at the Poynter Institute,…

Kristen Locker, a new graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University, is NLP’s 2020 Gwen Ifill Student of the Year. Locker, the first college student to receive the award, was nominated by her professor, Lyn Millner, a finalist for NLP’s Educator of the Year Award. “Kristen told us, ‘Checkology helped me navigate where I get my…

Here’s a “problem” any educator might like to have: Students find their class material so engaging that the teacher has to rein in the class discussion. That’s exactly what Jake Cameron and Angelica Cardona experienced at Queens High School of Teaching, Liberal Arts and the Sciences in Queens, New York. Using the Checkology® virtual classroom…

Editor’s note: Earlier this year we wrote about Conor Murphy, a teacher at West Genesee High School in Camillus, N.Y.  Murphy recently was named a finalist for NLP’s 2020 Educator of the Year Award. At that time he described NLP’s impact on his teaching: “My entire craft as an educator has been influenced so heavily…

The nonprofit Connect Safely’s June 16 webcast, hosted by journalist Larry Magid and author Kerry Gallagher, features NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller. The discussion centers on why media literacy is more important than ever, as well as misinformation on social media in general and particularly regarding COVID19. The live segment was recorded on…

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller discusses our  confusing digital information age on The Pew Charitable Trusts’ podcast After the Fact. During the June 12 segment, The Infodemic, Miller tells listeners: “We’re living in the most complex information landscape in human history.” He then shares ideas on how we can navigate an overwhelming stream…

As the COVID-19 pandemic began delivering a surge of misinformation to our social media feeds and inboxes, a student in Denise Wood’s Honors World Literature and Composition class emailed her. “I thank you for teaching us about misinformation last semester. It has helped a ton in recent days as I see loads of false claims,…

As a former Reuters correspondent in Chicago, I often reported on excessive force by law enforcement, including the deaths of Black people and the ensuing protests. The awful, unjust events of recent weeks and months — the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the racism faced by the Central Park birder…

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, bridges a 13-hour time difference to take questions from children in Australia on the podcast Real Kids Real Questions. Children host the program, which addresses topics kids in the listening audience suggest. During the June 7 episode Why ‘fake news’ is bad news, Peter answers questions about…

NLP’s Senior Vice President of Education Peter Adams and Jane Lytvynenko, senior reporter covering disinformation and security for BuzzFeed News discuss misinformation related to racial injustice protests on the WAMU program 1A. In the June 4 segment, How To Identify Misinformation About The Protests, they address conspiracy theories, disinformation and the role of social media.…

Once again, our nation must face the scourge of racial injustice with the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among too many others. These deaths have sparked protests around the country, highlighting the critical importance of our rights: to seek racial justice, to seek a redress of grievances, and to safeguard…

In a June 1 USA Today article, Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, discusses the hoaxes, fabrications, manipulated content and other protest misinformation proliferating on social media about widespread demonstrations against racial injustice. The protests were sparked by the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police on May 25.…

In response to growing concerns about how Twitter handles tweets from elected officials that violate the social media platform’s rules and community standards, News Literacy Project Founder and CEO Alan C. Miller issued the following statement: “This is a very important issue that grows more pressing each day and is only amplified by the current…

A few years ago Heather Turner, a teacher librarian in the Fabius-Pompey Central School District in central New York, saw social media posts from other librarians about Checkology® virtual classroom, and she was intrigued. “I was looking for something to augment what I was already doing with digital citizenship,” says Turner, who has been an…