I recently went back to school – specifically, to the Williamsburg College Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y. I was there to check out the News Literacy Project, an initiative founded last year by Alan Miller, a former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and an unflagging advocate for the value of journalism to society.
Alan’s approach is straightforward: He recruits professional journalists (not a few of them currently, um, between jobs) to guest-teach middle school and high school classes. They pointedly integrate into kids’ history, social studies, and English curricula lessons on the importance of news, the role of the First Amendment and a free press, and the need to consume media critically. The object, as Alan writes, is “to give students in middle schools and high schools the tools to appreciate the value of quality news and to encourage them to consume and create credible information across all platforms.”
At Williamsburg College Charter School, Katie Kingsbury, a former Time correspondent, asks Audry Harris’ seventh-grade class to spot the differences between the front pages of that morning’s New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, and El Diario: which stories are given the most ink, how are text and photos used, and what does that say about how each paper’s respective strategy? (She asks that more in a seventh-grade-friendly way.) She tells the kids about herself, then encourages them to ask questions, press-conference style.
It’s very basic stuff; this is most students’ first exposure to the News Literacy Project. Later, they’ll explore meatier topics that get them to reckon with the gap between fact and rumor; the quality of sources; the role and risks of Wikipedia, Google, and other online resources. You can watch a video that describes some of this here:
My Ashoka colleague Danielle Dumm wrote recently that efforts such as Miller’s that build journalism into everyday school curricula are important not only because they can help to prepare the next generation of journalists (whatever that means, in a world where, increasingly anyone can report the news) but also because basic journalistic skills – a facility with research, the capacity for critical analysis, empathy – are those that increasingly will be needed simply to be effective citizens.
I’ll agree, as do many others. The citizenship card is the one most often played to justify investments in news and media literacy: people who value news, who understand why it’s important to stay informed, who can pick out quality information from an overwhelming surfeit of data – those folks will be better equipped to participate in democracy, to challenge the status quo, to spot and solve problems. They also will serve as a check on the media itself; our system requires savvy information users to hold content producers and distributors accountable for what we read, hear, and watch.
But there’s another justification for news literacy strategies that I find even more compelling, and that’s rarely discussed. Ultimately, as the American journalism has learned the extremely hard way, someone has to pay for the news – and it’s hard to get people to pay for something they don’t value. Most traditional media have relied on advertising to foot the bills, and so have distanced themselves from this crucial value proposition with their audience; as advertisers have fled, news organizations have realized that what they do isn’t generally seen as something worth paying for.
There are two basic solutions. Journalists can improve the quality and relevance of their content – and they’d sure better. That’s the supply problem. Then there’s the demand side: More people have to understand why the news is, in fact, worth paying for – why, if done well, it serves their interests and society’s. That’s what’s happening in Audry Harris’ seventh-grade classroom in Brooklyn. Those kids are future citizens. They’re also future news buyers. Either way, we’d better treat them right.
[Photo: Meredith W. Gonclaves]
