Enhancing News Literacy

Illustration by Wesley Bedrosian.

A revolution in media has sparked an explosion of information, thanks largely to the Internet. Beyond traditional print and radio sources, we have opinion blogs, social networking and sharing Web sites, such as MySpace and YouTube, Wikipedia, and, of course, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on TV’s Comedy Central. Despite the apparent gains in diversity of perspective and ease of access to information, the concern over the reliability of sources extends particularly to youth consumers and their ability to decipher the truth amidst this vast array of media messages.

Beyond the need for literate consumers, the news is seeing its audience slip away. Teens in America pay little attention to daily current events, according to a study by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The 2007 report “Young People and the News” found that 28 percent of teens are basically inattentive to daily news and that an additional 32 percent casually attend to just a single source. Youth also tend to favor soft stories, such as celebrity reports, as opposed to hard news like the Iraq War, and they virtually ignore the paper, compared to television and Internet sources.

Even when they learn to read news critically, young people don’t seem to grasp the important role that a free press plays in society. That’s the finding of a November 2008 report. The study of 239 University of Maryland graduates who participated in a media literacy program found that the course often produced cynical attitudes about the press, “with little active understanding or awareness of … media’s essential role for informed citizenship,” said Paul Mihailidis, a journalism professor at Hofstra University who conducted the study.

A movement currently underway seeks to address news literacy in our nation’s schools. The effort is twofold: to give students, primarily in middle and high school, the tools to decide what news is reliable, objective, and fair, and to ensure a well-informed population for the future.

Educators from around the country and media professionals alike are attempting to define what news literacy is and how it can be enhanced among students. Representing the education side is Renee Hobbs, a founding member of the Temple University Media Education Lab (MEL). “In many schools and communities today, the exploration of news and current events is rather slender,” she says. “We really need to explore this issue of understanding, analyzing, creating, and participating in the world of news and current events.”

In one effort, the News Literacy Project (NLP), former Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Miller is combatting the paucity of news education one school at a time. Miller, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, left the Times’ Washington bureau in March 2008 to create NLP. “I had grown increasingly concerned about the future of quality journalism and the lack of interest in it among the younger generation. In 2006, as an investigative reporter for the Times, I was invited to speak about my career and why journalism matters to 175 sixth graders at my daughter’s middle school [Pyle Middle School] in Bethesda, MD, and it prompted me to think about a new way to make a difference,” he says.

NLP is an innovative program to help middle and high school students “sort fact from fiction in the digital age,” according to the NLP site. With pilot projects set to launch in early 2009, NLP involves pairing active and retired journalists with English, history, and social studies teachers, as well as after-school media clubs. Working with educators, the volunteer journalists will help devise curricula focusing on the relevance of news to today’s youth and help students take a critical view of content, prompting them to ask questions such as “Who created this?” “Whom does this benefit?” and “Is there bias or speculation present?”

Material will be presented through games, hands-on exercises, as well as the journalists’ own firsthand experiences, and new media, such as blogs, social networking sites, and Wikipedia will be among the examined resources. “Our program is intended to give students the tools to become smarter and more frequent consumers and creators of credible information,” Miller says, “and to light a spark of interest in news that will make them well-informed citizens and voters.”

Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation, NLP will premiere at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, NY, Facing History School in New York, NY, and the Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD. Additional sites will be added next year as the program goes national. Recently, the New York Times signed on to the project, pledging to help enlist current and former Times reporters and editors to volunteer in NPL’s after-school program.

“In their efforts to hold onto their often shrinking audiences, news organizations have tended to focus on the supply side,” Miller told the Knight Commission on News Literacy in November 2008. “[NLP’s] focus is on the demand side of the next generation.”

NLP was among the programs highlighted at “Rebooting the News: Reconsidering an Agenda for American Civic Education,” an October 23–24, 2008 event in Philadelphia, PA, which drew nearly 70 journalists, educators, new media professionals, and high school students to address the state of news literacy. The atmosphere was charged in the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election, and the location of the event, the National Constitution Center, fit the shared conviction among those present that only well- informed citizens can sustain a democracy. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. . . . They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

Participants at the event—cosponsored by the National Constitution Center, MEL, the Media Giraffe Project, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst—were a diverse group, ranging from working reporters to students from the Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philly. They included Jeannine Cook of Philadelphia’s Youth Empowerment Services, which runs a media program for out-of-school youth, Diana Mitsu-Klos, a senior project director at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Lizzy Berryman, online community director for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) and Howie Schneider, dean of the School of Journalism at SUNY Stony Brook and board member of NLP.

In his October 23 keynote at “Rebooting the News,” in which he described his innovative model for teaching news literacy, Schneider, a former senior editor at New York Newsday said, “We have to take on the mission of training the next generation of news consumers and that mission to me at least is as important, yet not more important, than just training journalists.” The first of its kind in the country, the Stony Brook news literacy course will be taught to 10,000 undergraduate students over the next four years and is viewed as an important model for how the subject is taught across all levels. Indeed, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook is set to develop curriculum for high school instruction and secondary teacher training programs and function as a resource center for all educators.

Meanwhile, teachers, students, and journalists have expressed excitement about NLP, says Miller, who took a temporary leave of absence from the Times after the Knight Foundation gave him a one-year planning grant, but left for good in March to fully commit to the project. “I believe that news literacy is an idea whose time has come,” he says. “Some hope that it hasn’t come too late.”