NLP News

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…

In a May 21 segment for Newsy, QAnon Conspiracy Movement Gains Followers In Uncertain Times, NLP’s Darragh Worland discusses the rise of the far-right QAnon claims. The movement is based around the theory that President Donald Trump is bringing about a “great awakening” and will expose prominent political figures — the Deep State — for…

Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at NLP, took part in the May 14 webinar Critical Thinking in the Age of Fake News hosted by the School Library Journal (SLJ) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). He was joined by panelists Renee DiResta, research manager at Stanford University Internet Observatory, and…

While 58% of Americans report being “well-informed” about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, more than a third (36%) say they feel “overwhelmed” by the information (and misinformation) circulating about the pandemic: That’s a key finding from a new survey conducted by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part…

Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic can be described in a variety of ways — alarming, outlandish, dangerous — but they shouldn’t be surprising. Even the Plandemic “documentary” that suddenly swept its way across social media earlier this month did so on a path paved with fragments of pandemic conspiracy theories that were already in…

Damaso Reyes, a former NLP staff member now working as a consultant from Barcelona, Spain, discusses the current misinformation landscape in the May 19 segment of Here and There with Dave Marsh on KFSR, Santa Fe’s public radio station. It was Reyes’ fourth appearance on the program discussing news literacy issues.

The viral conspiracy theory video Plandemic led to a wider discussion of how to identify credible news stories during a May 15 segment of Metrofocus, a program on WNET/New York Public Media. In an interview with reporter Jenna Flanagan, NLP’s John Silva explains how false stories gain traction and offered advice on how parents can…

The 26-minute video Plandemic which pushed an array of dangerous and provably false conspiracy theories and other misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic ignited fringe communities last week and went massively viral before major social media companies took steps to remove it from their platforms. Purporting to be a preview of an upcoming “documentary,” Plandemic relies…

Not long after schools closed in Jackson, Wyoming, in March due to COVID-19 health concerns, Charlotte Krugh found that her daughter, Julia, 11, had too much free time on her hands. The sixth-grader’s distance learning assignments occupied her about three hours a day. Her sister Eliza, 9, who attends a different school, had a full…

The Netherlands-based Coachability Foundation invited Darragh Worland, NLP’s senior vice president of creative services, to present a webinar on “The Role of News Literacy at the Entrepreneurial Journey” May 8. This event was part of Coachability Foundation’s mission to empower female entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and abroad.

South Carolina Public Radio’s May 7 program, An Rx for BS: A Look at Media Literacy in Crisis Mode, focuses on the hazards of encountering  COVID-19 pandemic misinformation and disinformation —much of it dangerous. The program includes tips from the News Literacy Project for identifying potential red flags when scrolling social media, or anywhere a person…

YouTube users in the United States will soon see information panels from third-party fact-checkers at the top of some search results, the company announced on April 28, citing the rapid spread of misinformation about COVID-19. The panels will appear in searches for specific claims and will feature relevant articles from “an open network of third-party…

The European Journalism Centre, a journalism training and advocacy nonprofit in Maastricht, Netherlands, has released the third edition of its Verification Handbook, an online primer designed to help journalists investigate online content. The guide is edited by Craig Silverman, the media editor at BuzzFeed News and a digital fact-checking pioneer, and includes contributions from a…

In honor of World Press Freedom Day, NLP’s founder and CEO, Alan C. Miller, wrote an op-ed for CNN about why we must allow journalists to do the hard work of keeping the public safe and informed during this pandemic. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by attacks on press freedoms and journalists around the world amid the Covid-19…

The next decade is critical for the future of journalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic is deepening existing crises that already threaten free and independent reporting, Reporters Without Borders said April 21 as it released its annual World Press Freedom Index, which ranks 180 countries and regions on the level of freedom they afford journalists. Christophe…