NLP News

The most essential question to ask of viral online content is also frequently one of the most difficult to answer: Where did this come from? While this question isn’t new — after all, purveyors of misinformation have always “adapted their workflows to the latest medium” — it has been elevated by an information ecosystem optimized for anonymity,…

NLP’s recently announced partnership with the E.W. Scripps Company was the topic of a segment today on Cincinnati Edition, a public affairs program on NPR affiliate WVXU. Alan Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO, and Scripps CEO Adam Symson explained how — and why — Scripps and NLP are teaming up to help people become savvy…

Is one of your goals as a teacher to help your students make sense of the torrent of news and other information streaming through their online worlds? Would you like to empower your students by providing them with the news literacy skills they need to become active and engaged participants in civic life? Our new…

On Thursday, NLP and the E.W. Scripps Company, one of the nation’s largest independent TV station owners and steward of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, announced a multi-year partnership to help the next generation of news consumers learn to separate facts from falsehoods in today’s challenging information landscape. Working together, educators, journalists and media organizations…

Valeria Luquin, a high school sophomore who applies skills gleaned from the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom in her daily life, has been named NLP’s Gwen Ifill Student of the Year for 2019. “Valeria has taken everything she’s learned on Checkology to heart,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO. “She not only has brought…

Seven Days, an independent weekly newspaper based in Burlington, Vermont, interviewed NLP’s associate director of education, Suzannah Gonzales, for the Aug. 7 article “Real or Fake? Test Your News Literacy by Taking Our Quiz.” The article also included questions from NLP’s own news literacy quiz.

Enrique Acevedo, co-anchor of Univision’s Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna, the network’s late-night news program, is the 2019 recipient of the News Literacy Project’s John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year Award. “Enrique made major contributions to NLP on important fronts in the past year with considerable skill and professionalism,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO.…

A new report from the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, confirms what we at the News Literacy Project have long known: There’s an urgent need for media literacy education that is scalable, culturally relevant and readily available. Released earlier this month, Exploring Media Literacy Education as a Tool for Mitigating Truth Decay was…

NLP’s Newsroom to Classroom program gets a shout-out from a columnist and college student on the website of the News Media Alliance on July 22. Arantxa Hernandez writes that students of all ages need to learn how to better discern credible journalism from irresponsible, biased or misleading content.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an op-ed by NLP Director of Education John Silva on July 25 regarding the urgent need for news literacy education. John was in Columbia, Missouri, that week to participate in news literacy workshops at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The Washington Post’s education reporter Valerie Strauss discusses the work of NLP and features resources from The Sift®, our free weekly newsletter for educators, in her piece on how the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has become a tool for teachers. The column ran July 24, 2019, the day Mueller testified before…

Millions of Americans will be paying close attention on Wednesday when former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testifies before two congressional committees about his investigation into Russia’s election interference in 2016 and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald J. Trump. While Democrats and Republicans will no doubt disagree over Mueller’s testimony, it highlights…

While it’s an exaggeration to say that the whole world was watching when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20 fifty years ago, this history-defining moment truly riveted people around the globe. NASA estimates that 650 million people — almost 20% of the global population…

Although the calendar and the thermometer tell us that it’s summer, it’s a new year at NLP. To better align with the teaching and learning schedules of the educators and students we serve, NLP kicks off its new year in July — not with corks popping or a ball dropping, but with a staff retreat.…

Civics education is a cornerstone of news literacy, and legislators in Illinois have passed — and sent to Gov. JB Pritzker for his signature — a bill that would require a civics course in middle school. (State education standards already require a civics course in high school.) Peter Medlin of Northern Public Radio, the broadcast…

How are you celebrating the Fourth of July — with fireworks, a parade, a family cookout? May we suggest sharpening your news literacy skills? Our nation’s founders would be proud of you. While they didn’t have to contend with the 24-hour news cycle, internet trolls or disinformation-spewing bots, the Founding Fathers were concerned that misinformation…

Usually, the last day of school is an exercise in the mundane: emptying lockers, clearing out desks, shelving books in the library. But that wasn’t the case on June 20 for the fourth-graders in Jodi Mahoney’s technology classroom at Carl Von Linné School in Chicago. They wrapped up the school year with a virtual visit…

One year ago today, a gunman opened fire in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. The attack took the lives of five people, four of them journalists, on the deadliest day for American journalism in modern history. Embed from Getty Images With that tragedy in mind, legislation introduced in Congress this week…

The Pulitzer Prizes website promoted NLP’s Newsroom to Classroom in an article on June 25, 2019. The piece explains how Newsroom to Classroom works and notes that it expands on NLP’s original journalist volunteer program.

Diego Hernandez, who recently completed ninth grade at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Van Nuys, California, believes misinformation can harm your outlook on the world. But Checkology® virtual classroom, which he used in his journalism class, has changed how Diego approaches news and other information. “Now I’m thinking on both sides of the spectrum,”…

Christina Van Tassell, the chief financial officer at Dow Jones, and Molly Hill Patten, chief operating officer at Ideas42, a nonprofit that applies behavioral science to complex problems around the world, are the two newest members of the News Literacy Project’s board. “Molly and Christina bring impressive financial experience and acumen to the NLP board,…

For Univision reporter Maria Alesia Sosa, the recent news that press freedom in the United States was now considered “problematic” by an international media watchdog group wasn’t as daunting as it might be to other U.S. reporters. It’s not that she isn’t concerned about the trend — but she is from Venezuela, which is ranked…

Valeria Luquin, a ninth-grader at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Van Nuys, California, is one of the thousands of students who have benefited from the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom. She said it has helped her to become more aware of the news and other information she encounters every day. “I feel like…

The conclusions that political scientists Morgan Marietta and David C. Barker reach in their new book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy, are enough to make the reader despair. Based on data from national surveys conducted from 2013 to 2017, they determined that “dueling fact perceptions are rampant, and they are more…

You won’t always see Kelly Melendez Loaiza’s students using beakers and Bunsen burners to demonstrate their grasp of the scientific method. That’s because this science teacher brings the rigors of evidence-based inquiry out of the lab and onto the laptop. “Facts must be supported by reliable sources. They are not feelings or hunches,” Melendez Loaiza…

In the 11 years since I founded the News Literacy Project, I have learned time and again that it takes a lasting, comprehensive approach to overcome the scourge of misinformation. A recent incident involving the Poynter Institute starkly illustrates that point. On April 30, the respected journalism education nonprofit released a list, under the title…

Paul Saltzman, the investigative news editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has a simple answer when asked whether the public has a solid understanding of what “news judgment” means. “No,” said Saltzman, who has volunteered with the News Literacy Project since 2011 and is the host of the “What Is News?” lesson in NLP’s Checkology® virtual…

In a commentary published by USA Today, NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller connects the viral pandemic of misinformation and the rapidly increasing growth in the number of measles cases across the United States and around the world. He notes that decisions and actions based on false information may pose real dangers — and,…

Sunday’s episode of In Depth with Hal Eisner, a news program that airs on Fox11 in Los Angeles, led with a segment on misinformation featuring NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller and Valeria Luquin, a high school student who has learned valuable news literacy skills from NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom. Eisner then invited Valeria’s mother,…

Answer Sheet, The Washington Post’s education blog, reprinted an essay written by NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller and published earlier this week on NLP’s Medium page. Miller’s essay, “Stop the Misinformation Virus: Don’t Be a Carrier,” discusses the importance of news literacy education. “The ability to distinguish fact from fiction is as important…

The growing contagion of online misinformation should serve as a national wake-up call: We need a new ethos of personal responsibility about the news and other information that we trust — and that we share.

Cristy Menor, a sophomore at the University of California, Riverside, is majoring in sociology and minoring in education, but you could say that she’s doing an unofficial minor in news literacy, too.

Boulder Weekly, a news outlet in Boulder, Colorado, interviewed NLP’s Alan C. Miller about the need for news literacy. The Colorado legislature is considering a bill that would require media literacy education in schools. “We need to teach students to think like journalists,” Miller said, and “the educators need to be informed to inform their…

Rumormongers and perpetrators of hoaxes online work hard to deceive people, but they are no match for the journalism students at The Morgan School, a public high school in Clinton, Connecticut. Their teacher, Leslie Chausse, uses the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom to develop their critical-thinking skills and hone their journalism chops. “There is so…

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller discussed NLP’s mission — ensuring that young people learn the news literacy skills needed to navigate today’s challenging information landscape — during an in-depth interview on the PBS public affairs program The Open Mind. Watch “Alan Miller: You’re Not Entitled to Your Own Facts” here.

Engadget, EdSurge and 9to5Mac featured items on Apple’s new initiative, announced March 19, to support three “nonpartisan, independent media literacy programs” in the United States and in Italy, including the News Literary Project.

I am extremely pleased to share some exciting news: Apple announced today that it has selected the News Literacy Project to play a central role in a new initiative supporting leading nonprofit organizations that provide nonpartisan news literacy programs in the United States and in Italy. Apple’s investment in our work represents the largest corporate…

Today, on International Women’s Day, we honor a pioneer in investigative journalism: Nellie Bly. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in western Pennsylvania in 1864, Bly began her newspaper career when she was only 20, covering women’s rights, child labor, dangerous conditions for factory workers and social justice reform for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. But when her articles…

Judy Bryson, the library media teacher at W.A. Carter High School in the Rialto (California) Unified School District, believes that news literacy skills are critical to student success — inside and outside the classroom.

“While an educator’s first mission is to teach students a body of knowledge, their second is to ensure that students learn how to find information on their own, and navigate what they discover, safely, on their own,” writes Lauren Barack of Education Dive. NLP’s $5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight…