The organization has done that through a weekly email newsletter called the Sift, an online learning platform called Checkology, and other resources and programs that have together reached an estimated 2 million students in the last year and more than 50,000 educators in all 50 states and 120 countries.Ī number of major events in recent years, including the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., have underscored the need for better news literacy-the COVID-19 pandemic and the riots at the Capitol on Jan. “In many ways, I feel like we went from being a voice in the wilderness to an answer to a prayer, particularly after the 2016 election,” he adds.įrom its inception, NLP has sought to be strictly nonpartisan, aiming to teach people how to think about the news and information they consume, not what to think about it, Salter explains. Miller added that, 14 years ago, if someone had told him that tens of millions of Americans would later believe and promote “absolutely discredited conspiratorial thinking”-and would be acting on it in ways that influenced public health decisions and the health of our democracy-he wouldn’t have believed it.
If we can’t agree on what a fact is-if the marketplace of ideas breaks down-then how are we ever going to achieve consensus to tackle the other great challenges of our time? How are we ever going to bridge the digital divide-the digital abyss-if we have different realities of a pandemic, of the outcome of an election, of a war in Ukraine with Russia?” “It underscores everything else: immigration, climate change, public health. Misinformation “has actually become one of the greatest-if not the greatest-challenges of our time,” says Miller in an interview with EdSurge reflecting on the organization’s history and trajectory. Indeed, it would turn out to be even more critical than he anticipated. In 2008, when Miller started the News Literacy Project following a visit to his daughter’s sixth grade class, he thought news literacy would be an important skill for students and educators in the age of burgeoning social media and smartphones. If we can’t agree on what a fact is … then how are we ever going to achieve consensus to tackle the other great challenges of our time?” -Alan Miller, founder and outgoing CEO of the News Literacy Project Salter, who currently serves as NLP’s president and chief operating officer, will bring his background in education-as a teacher, a principal, a superintendent, and a nonprofit leader-to the organization’s growing staff.
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