Last night, I took one of my kids to see Vivian Schiller (the president of NPR) and Katharine Weymouth (the publisher of The Washington Post) discuss “The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age” with moderator Ray Suarez of “PBS NewsHour.” So why were these folks talking about journalism to a multi-age crowd at a high school? Because it was part of The News Literacy Project.
The point of the News Literacy Project is to bring experienced journalists together with students from middle and high school to help kids learn how to tell fact from fiction, how to sort the wheat from the chaff. That's their mission, but along the way, the NLP are also helping interested students learn how to be trustworthy journalists. A worthy outcome, indeed.
You can learn more about the News Literacy Project here.
(Side-note: Ray Suarez has been added to my list of great voices.)
Wow, you posting this made me realize kids today must have no concept of real 'news'. A tragedy really. I was a journalism major in college. It's been sad watching its demise. We used to pride ourselves on having a free press in this country. Now we're just propoganda, like what we used to hold ourselves above the old USSR for.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem is not that real news is not available, because it is (I like both NPR and The Washington Post), but that there are so many sources of "news" on the Internet that you have to be careful figuring out which things to believe. What's legit? Wikipedia itself drives endless conversations about this.
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