Reboot-home

Abandoning the news

In spring 2005, the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned noted U.S. editor Merrill Brown to write a report, "Abandoning the News," which examined how the nation's news organizations, struggling with changing business models and demographics, were devoting fewer and fewer resources to newsrooms. But Brown also saw the problem as one of demand, not just supply, when he wrote:

In short, the future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news.

Indeed, American teen-agers are abandoning traditional news products in large numbers, or simply failing to engage with the news as they mature. In homes and classrooms, students are failing to receive the information they need to make informed decisions as voters and citizens. Yet they are highly engaged with media in multiple forms.

Over the last three years, some foundations and institutions have recognizing the significance of these changes on participatory democracy. They have launched new research or curriculum initiatives aimed at assessing or improving the situation.

Rebooting the News: Setting an Agenda for American Civic Education

On Sept. Sept. 25-28, 2008, an invited group of about 50 journalists, researchers, scholars, educators, teachers, administrators, policy makers and leaders of non-profit and cultural organizations will convene in the cradle of American democracy -- Philadelphia for "Rebooting the News: Setting an Agenda for American Civic Education."

We intend to:

• Share knowledge about independent projects and research
• Review competing solution paradigms
• Assess the role of news and news organizations in solutions
• Consider the value of new national policy strategies
• Adopt recommendations for journalists and educators

EXPECTED OUTCOME

"Rebooting the News: Setting an Agenda for American Civic Education," is a critical examination of the relationship among media, news and U.S. public education, the projects underway and a charting of the most promising directions. Our goal is ideas and recommendations distilled into a post-event report for rebooting the news -- making its presentation and content relevant both to a new generation and to democracy's requirement for an informed, engaged electorate.

Location, co-convenors

Temple University's Media Education Laboratory will physically host this knowledge-sharing, review, assessment and solution planning in Center City facilities just blocks from Independence Hall. Over an afternoon, evening and two days, we'll use a combination of short presentations, round-table discussions and "open-space" breakout sessions organized by participants. We'll include lots of time for information networking and mini projects.

Among other tentative convenors:

• The Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
• The School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, Long Island, N.Y.
• The Center for Future Civic Media at MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
• Appleseed: The News Literacy Project, Bethesda, Md.
• The Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, Mo.

WHAT WE'LL CONSIDER

Some of the things we expect "Reboot the News" to consider:

• Assessing the value of student-created media

New media forms, such as YouTube, present significant evolving uncertainties about trust, sourcing and reliability which magnify the need to offer students skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media. Ideas about adding new media to the classroom are widely available, but little research exists on how media are used, or about the pedagogical value of media works created by students with civic purpose.

• Testing without civic component -- undermining frameworks?

Many states have civics education requirements as part of the curriculum. They include valuable basic instruction on government such as the Constitution, the balance of powers, and how a bill becomes a law. Some state curriculum frameworks also encourage media-literacy education. However, is the growing reliance on "teach-to-the-test" -- where test questions don't cover civics or news literacy -- made such frameworks irrelevant?

• Using news as a frame for core curriculum -- does it work?

Often on an ad hoc basis, many of America's best teachers find ways to use current-event news materials in the classroom to illustrate curriculum points in history, social studies or literature. What work is underway to help them, and does this approach produce more engaged citizens?

• Using journalists to address two challenges?

With students engaged in online activities at unprecedented levels . . . their access to media is almost unlimited . . . they have moved from primarily web searching to media creation sites such as FaceBook, YouTube and MySpace. To engage students in understanding current events it must be on this broad media playing field. Few classroom teachers have both the journalism skills and the media tools to help students become engaged in creating their own media. Can journalists become allies with teachers in this effort? What will be the impact on the survival of the news business? A collaboration of teachers and journalists could change how our schools prepare teen-agers for media use in a civil society, and address two key challenges:

• How to elevate in the minds of school boards and state curriculum framers the importance of media-literacy education as a core element of preparing teenagers to be informed, engaged citizens.
• In an environment of little-or-no financial resources, how to offer teachers the tools and training they need to be able to work with new-technology media resources alongside increasingly media-savvy (but not necessary news-savvy) students.

WHAT IS NEWS LITERACY?

What is news literacy? It’s considerably broader than the field of journalism education, where young people get a professional orientation to the field as a means to consider career opportunities. News literacy aims to address the needs of all young people, preparing them to be citizens who use news and information to guide their decision-making in all aspects of their lives.

News literacy education prepares young people to be citizens by helping them develop an interest in news and current events, stimulating the skills to critically analyze the messages they receive, and inspiring the self-efficacy needed to use information to make effective decisions and take action in their schools, communities and the wider world. There are several different models for news literacy programs and each approach the practice with a unique set of assumptions, goals, and strategies for educating youth.

Identifying assumptions and best practices

At part of "Rebooting the News," we'll identify the working assumptions that underlie programs in news literacy, take a close look at the “best practices” that are at the heart of the programs, and identify the kinds of research questions that are emerging as this work moves forward.

POTENTIAL PARTICIPANTS

Some potential participants may include:

• Alan Miller of the Appleseed project in Bethesda, Maryland which is using a volunteer network of journalists serve as news ambassadors, visiting classrooms and teaching about news literacy.
• Nolan Bowie of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy
• Fabrice Florin, News Trust
• Fred Risinger, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Bonnie Clark, Newspapers in Education
• Ingrid Hu Dahl, Youth Media Reporter
• Dale Allender, Director, National Council of Teachers of English
• Lance Bennett, University of Washington
• Cary Bazalgette, News Network, British Film Institute/Education
• Sandy Woodcock, Newspaper Association of America Foundation
• Jill Wilson, St. Petersburg Times Newspaper in Education program
• Kim Spencer, Link TV
• Paul Folkemer, Education Director, Channel One
• Orlando Bagwell, Ford Foundation
• Connie Flanagan , Penn State University
• Todd Clark, Constitutional Rights Foundation
• Sam Chaltain, Five Freedoms Project

We will discuss these questions:

• How can we best promote interest in news and current events as well as critical analysis and evaluation skills among young people and non-journalists?

• What approaches work best in introducing secondary-school teachers to integrating news and current events along with news analysis and production activities across the curriculum?

• How do the concepts of relevance, credibility and authority play a role in developing the spiral of awareness, analysis, reflection and action to promote authentic learning?

• News literacy emphasizes the ability to “read between the lines” to recognize implicit or subtext messages. The messages reveal values expressed in news. What is the appropriate role of news organizations in promoting skills of news literacy?

• One of the fundamental concepts in media literacy comes from the work of cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams, who defined the practice of various “reading positions” toward cultural texts, including dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings. We will ask: What does it mean to teach people how to “read” news and journalism from a dominant, negotiated or oppositional frame?

• Do the steeply declining rates of news readership suggest that people find the dominant paradigm of news less relevant to their actual needs for monitoring news and information in their communities, nation and world?