Bananas cause AIDS. An online article making that claim had Dominick Tambroni, 18, doing a double-take when he read it last fall.
“The site itself looked kind of sketchy, which led me to think that story couldn’t possibly be true,” said Tambroni, who enrolled last semester in a newly launched West Genesee High School course based on the News Literacy Project’s “Checkology” curriculum. “But they were passing that story off as if it was real news.
“Honestly,” added Tambroni, of West Genesee, N.Y., “I feel like a lot of kids don’t care about stuff like that, which is not right. Because this is a way bigger deal than people realize. They could be getting totally tricked. I think I’ll be getting tricked a lot less now.”
That’s a desired result of the literacy project’s protracted bid to help people separate facts from fictions across an increasingly digital, fast-moving, multi-portal, sometimes befuddling media landscape.
Now hosting its first nationwide News Literacy Week, the 12-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based project has 22,000 classroom teachers registered to use its instructional templates and 140,000 participating middle and high school students, its targeted audience. The week offers ramped-up activities for those kids. Also, through televised public service announcements featuring Hollywood celebrities, interactive online quizzes and other means, the week aims to hone the general public’s skill at distinguishing empirical information from intended and accidental disinformation.
“Every person today is their own editor and can be their own publisher,” 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winner Alan Miller, the literacy project’s founder and CEO, told Pulitzer.org. “We want students to play those roles in ways that are credible. We want them to become up-standers for facts.”
He continued: “This is a challenge across all ages and demographics, including college students … Now, there also are studies suggesting that our seniors are the most vulnerable, which makes sense when you consider that they’re not digital natives nor as conversant with the digital landscape.”
This inaugural literacy week, with the E.W Scripps Co. as its main sponsor, is part of a longer roster of expanded, special programming whose details are soon to come, Miller said.
Those accumulated efforts are more essential now than ever, Scripps CEO Adam Symson said.
“News consumers, in general, and young people, in particular, are faced with the most crowded and confusing content marketplace in the history of communication. That’s mostly due to digital fragmentation and social media,” he said.
News literacy efforts, Symson added, give young people tools in “how to determine what is opinion and what is journalism, sponsored content and actual reporting. The idea is to bring that skill to them so that, as they emerge as young adults to a place where they will be influencing the way things happen in society — in the voting booth and, beyond that, as engaged citizens of this country — that they have the skills necessary to be informed and not influenced.”
The non-partisan News Literacy Project partners also include Scripps’ 60 local TV stations, Associated Press, Bangor Daily News, NPR, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Vox, The Valley Breeze, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
The Pulitzers have streamed its annual prize announcement to literacy project students in their classrooms and engaged them in online Q&As about journalism. "A free press is fundamental to our democracy,” Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy said. “And supporting news literacy — especially among young people engaging with a rapidly evolving media landscape — is critical. News Literacy Week is an important public service to students, like those who have enthusiastically attended the Pulitzer Prize announcement in years past and who are future readers and leaders."
Genesee High’s Conor Murphy, a social studies instructor who created “Navigating Current Events,” based on News Literacy’s Checkology curriculum, said he started exploring how the news industry works with his student back in 2017 because felt an urgency. “In the classroom, among students, what I was seeing was just a misunderstanding of reality. If they are misled about social issues or political issues or economic factors, then, they will not have an appropriate eye toward community needs.”
In the two Checkology-based classes he taught last fall, combined, just nine of 60 student seats went empty. Encouraged by the level of interest, he scheduled the same course for the current semester. “One of things I’ve made sure to repeat as much as I can to students and people in my life is that I want them to become skeptical rather than cynical consumers of information,” Murphy said. “Those who’ve bought into have been willing to question what they see, willing to think about it and do their own lateral research.”
Paid subscriber-based Checkology, which is available for free to the general public this week, has registered users in all 50 states, four U.S. territories and more than 100 nations, News Literacy Project Communications Director Carol McCarthy wrote in an email.
Two-thirds of students, after completing the Checkology sessions online, were able to identify newsworthiness, use of multiple, verified reporting sources, balanced reporting, avoidance of bias and other standards of quality journalism, according to the project’s 2018-19 report.
According to Google analytics, News Literacy Project’s overall website traffic, from Jan. 1 through Jan. 28, 2020 increased by 1,793 percent over the same period in 2019. From Monday through Wednesday, during this inaugural News Literacy Week, the website has logged 58,308 visits, compared to 3,081 during the same three days of 2019.
The project’s weekly newsletter, Sift, has 12,000 subscribers, said CEO Miller, who left the Los Angeles Times to do his current work. Moving forward, attracting more smaller, including local, news organizations as partners is a major goal, Miller said. So, is getting more journalist volunteers — so far, there are 103 — into the Newsroom to Classroom program.
A host of individuals and institutions are needed to help keep students grounded, Miller said, “in how to discern credible information, how to spot misinformation, how to understand the role of the First Amendment and the watchdog role of journalism — and how to look for bias is everything they consume, including their own bias that they bring to the news and information they encounter.”