News Literacy

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Bringing Help to News Deserts: Lesson Plan

In a news desert that doesn’t have trained journalists seeking truth and expert opinions about education in its community, students can help fill that void.

In Search of a Free and Fair Press

To help students read more critically, compare two news articles about the same event and start developing the skills to spot ways some media may be giving readers a slanted view.

Journalism in American History

This inquiry-based lesson allows students to research major eras in journalism, notable people and technological advancements in the field.

Futures Wheels: Developing and Refining Journalistic Story Planning to Better Identify Context, Background and Meaningful Events, Empowering Journalism’s Social Responsibilities 

Futures Wheels were designed by futurists to see what the future might bring, positive or negative. Can it be a part of journalistic story planning, source acquisition and other types of information processing to craft stories that meet audience needs?

Black Journalism in America

After reading news stories from a variety of Black and general audience media, students will be able to analyze differences in coverage, sources and perspectives in current news.

Famous Black journalists

After learning basic information about historic and current Black journalists, students will create a project looking more in depth into one historical figure.

Examining Racial Bias in Mainstream Media

This lesson provides students an opportunity to discuss how racial bias impacts news coverage in mainstream media outlets through a short video about multidisciplinary artist Alexandra Bell.

Analyzing Media Coverage and Finding Factual and Unbiased News

This lesson focuses on teaching media biases through the scope of identifying and analyzing media coverage.

Evaluating Political Ads

Students will evaluate advertisements, consider the ethical dilemmas of using persuasive tactics in political advertising and create their own political advertisements.

News vs Public Relations

In this lesson, students will differentiate between student reporting and school public relations by comparing and contrasting student publications with school public relations content.

Understanding fake news

Are social networking sites useful for understanding news?

Covering sensitive topics — Exploring media coverage of race cases

This lesson explores news editorial coverage of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases by looking at editorials printed by major newspapers during the cases and grand jury investigations.

How the pros fact check

This lesson walks students through the fact checking process of professionals at the American Press Institute and Politifact. Then, students will apply this same process to their own fact-checking exercise.

Infotainment: When news is only about entertainment

Who owns the news?

How the economics of news affects truth

When journalists must advocate for themselves

Students will evaluate a July 4 front page that advocates for freedoms and for a critical awareness of government actions.

Developing literacy across media platforms

The expert curator

In this lesson, students explore the concept of information curation.

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