Giving Compass' Take:

• Mark Sullivan and Tim Bajarin describe how the News Literacy Project is providing lessons to teach students how to spot fake news. 

• How can funders help to increase the breadth and reach of this project? How can schools integrate news literacy into their core curriculum? 

• Find out why fake news often wins out online. 

The News Literacy Project, an education program aimed at helping young people distinguish real news from fake news in the age of weaponized social media, attacks the fake news problem at the consumer level. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit says that since the 2016 elections, it’s been fielding a surge in demand from teachers across the world. Recently, it received a $1 million grant from Facebook to help expand its curricula.

The News Literacy Project was founded in 2008 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Miller as a middle and high school classroom project in Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Chicago. Its lessons and materials are apolitical, created with input from real journalists. It teaches students how to recognize the earmarks of quality journalism and credible information, and how to know if articles are accurate and appropriately sourced. It teaches kids to categorize information, make and critique news judgments, detect and dissect viral rumors, interpret and apply the First Amendment, and recognize confirmation bias.

In one exercise, students are placed into the shoes of a young news reporter covering a breaking story. They’re asked to interview experts and eyewitnesses and review other material, then build a story piece-by-piece through multiple choice questions. They’re asked, in a sense, to think like a good journalist.

More recently, NLP’s leadership realized that the “in classroom” approach was not scalable enough, according to the organization’s COO, Chuck Salter, who is a former school superintendent. (No relation to Fast Company‘s Chuck Salter.) So in May of 2016, in the heat of presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, NLP launched its own e-learning platform, the Checkology virtual classroom. By adopting its curricula to the web, any classroom with an internet connection could access courses taught by distinguished journalists.

Read the full article about spotting fake new by Mark Sullivan and Tim Bajarin at FastCompany.