Working Lunch: Recommendations for Next Steps from Breakout Group Leaders

During the course of the conference, attendees and presenters split into six groups, and each group had two “breakout group” sessions in which to brainstorm specific ideas for moving news literacy forward. During the last lunch session of the conference, the groups presented two sets of recommendations specific to the theme the group was investigating. The first was to come up with three recommendations for moving news literacy forward in the next 12 months. And the second was to suggest where to spend $1 million in hypothetical (and perhaps, real) grant money.

The following represents the final recommendations of each group:

How can news media organizations partner with universities and high schools to create and support News Literacy initiatives?

Group leader: Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor, The New York Times

Recommendations for moving this forward in the next 12 months:

• Create a database of people/journalists so that schools would have access to these folks for their initiatives. This would have to be kept up to date.
• Create a database of course materials and of practical examples (case studies). This has to be kept up to date. Requires a full-time job to find video, find clips, get access, outtakes, etc.
• Encourage news organizations to give students the outlet to publish their own work. This could include publishing blogs, such as the burgeoning use of community-journalists to cover hyper-local events (see: NYT).

Where to spend $1 million:

• Create the various databases.
• Hire someone(s) full-time to keep the databases up to date.
• Hire regional coordinators to work with specific news outlets and schools in each area.

How can News Literacy be developed for diverse and global communities?

Group leader: Susan Moeller, Director, International Center for Media and Public Agenda, University of Maryland

Recommendations for moving this forward in the next 12 months:

• Focus on basic skills and standards that are global common denominators (recognition of distinct characteristics unique to particular locations)
• Focus on information literacy (or news literacy/media literacy as appropriate)
• Attention to different audiences (social classes, ethnicities, religions, cultures/customs) which have distinct access, experiences, needs and interests (development of multilingual/multicultural plans: vocabulary of news literacy not always translatable (reliability/trust)

Where to spend $1 million:

Part 1

• $300K to create media literacy lesson plans in Spanish and English, with a focus on local-regional case studies
• $50K for Knight fellows from Latin America and Salzburg partner universities to conduct assessment of what lesson plans should be created (12+ lesson plans)
• $150K for Salzburg Academy special track to create lesson plans: Knight fellows join Salzburg partner universities
• $50K for editing and translation of lesson plans

Part 2

• $575K for regional sessions to train the trainers/teachers. Knight Fellows and Salzburg Academy partner universities work to identify local partners. High school and university teachers, schools, school systems, Ministries of Education, media implementers/trainers, ICFJ, Internews
• $175K: Texas/Border region
• $100K: Mexico/Mexico City
• $100K: Argentina/Buenos Aires
• $100K: Chile/Santiago
• $100K: Peru/Lima

Part 3

• $125K for media outreach: help children connect with families and read newspapers. Coordinate with WAN/NIE to create newspaper inserts out of one of more lesson plans.

How can universities rapidly develop and approve News Literacy Programs?

Group Leader: Jack Hamilton, Dean, LSU Manship School of Mass Communications

Recommendations on how to think about moving this forward (not necessarily in 12 months):

• Each school will need to find its own way to do this; it will have to be sui generis. Let 100 flowers bloom.
• Thinking about moving forward quickly is probably not the best approach because of slowness and bureaucracy at academic institutions. That said, using a special topics course or honors course to test the waters may be something that can be implemented quickly.
• To really solidify a news literacy course or program at a university, one needs a combination of: presidential support, senior and upper administrators who think it’s worthwhile, and enthusiastic lower administrators. It takes time to build this support, and it’s necessary to go through all the steps if the concept is going to have any longevity.

Where to spend $1 million:

• Fund a broad approach to getting new models in a variety of academic settings with the centerpiece focused on the news. The concept of news literacy could be taught in conjunction with a variety of different disciplines, including: social sciences, law, physical sciences, etc
• Invite several institutions to put forward proposals for models of how they might teach news literacy in these disciplines. There could be courses/questions like: How scientists read the news; How political scientists read the news; How lawyers read the news? Any institution that agreed to do this, would commit to sending administrators/professors to trainings (maybe at Stony Brook) to see what news literacy is—and some of the methods used to pass news literacy knowledge on to students. And any course materials developed via this process could be used by other institutions.
• Another idea is to take some of the presentations from the conference at Stony Brook on the road. Go to events where provosts and other upper administrators meet (conferences, for instance), and present the concept of news literacy there and demonstrations of the possible ways to implement teaching it at the undergraduate level.

How can digital technology help shape News Literacy courses?

Group Leader: Andrew Heyward, Former President, CBS News; Senior Adviser, the Monitor Group. Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust.net presented the findings.

Recommendations for moving this forward in the next 12 months:

• Online resource center: clearinghouse for best practices. News literacy lesson plans and guidelines. Case studies of best and worst coverage examples. Materials for news providers. Tools to aggregate, rate, compare news. Social networking connections and discussion groups.
• Training for teachers: All grade levels, K-12 to college. Learn applications as well as technologies. Collaborate with students, peer-to-peer. Access to tools like computers and digital technology. Tech support.
• News Application for Students: Helps student make choices as editors. Based on news literacy principles. encourages peer-to-peer comparisons. Learning through game-like interactions. Progressive skill development over course. Help to express and compare student worldviews.
• Worldview Construction Kit: Online multiplayer application. based on students’ current news consumption. Auto-track what news you view and link most. Sort your news links (facts vs. opinion)). Express your worldview with best stories. Compare and contrast different worldviews. Sixty second, student newscasts. Game-like rewards and user interface. Publish weekly broadcast with best newscasts. Built-in instructional and training materials.

Where to spend $1 million:

• Online resource center
• Training for teachers
• News application for students

How can journalism schools take on a new university-wide role in News Literacy?

Group Leader: Charles Bierbauer, Dean, College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, University of South Carolina.

Recommendations for moving this forward in the next 12 months:

• Provide seed grants to journalism programs at schools and colleges. Specifically those schools that are ready to move forward with news literacy programs that reach beyond journalism majors. Give $25K per institutions, and spread the money around.
• Set up a clearinghouse so that schools can collectively use, participate with, and share some of the ideas already coming into play at Stony Brook.
• Develop external partners with professional and academic organizations.
• Bonus recommendation: Before President Kenny leaves get her to write a letter to other university presidents. Presidents can be a force at other institutions.

Where to spend $1 million:

• Don’t limit yourself to five schools. We think you can accomplish something on forty campuses with $25K grants
• If you’re anxious to spend $1 million, create a referenced, online, news literacy journal, which would solve problems, like: Will teaching a news literacy course help me get tenure? How do we communicate our findings and what works? It would also be a way to spread interest beyond the group of people already interested in the subject.

How can high schools introduce News Literacy into current curricula?

Group leader: Gloria Sesso, Direct of Social Studies, Patchogue-Medford Schools, Long Island, New York. Findings presented by Rita-Marie Murphy who is a teacher at the Patchogue-Medford Schools,

Recommendations for moving this forward in the next 12 months:

• Create an action group to advocate to the state that we need news literacy as a standard in our schools.
• Collect data on programs, and post results of studies on news literacy.
• Integrate news literacy into existing K-12 courses by focusing on news literacy skills. Take what is learned here (and in the future) back to professional development programs to share with others.

Where to spend $1 million:

• That money would go very quickly, so spend some of the seed money on a grant writing component.
• Train teachers about news literacy, and train journalists how to teach students.
• Train teachers, as a first step, on how to use existing technology to incorporate news literacy lessons in the classroom.
• Create a website with a set of news literacy standards for use by anyone—with suggestions on incorporating this material into an existing curriculum.
• Create an elective course. Elective courses are the first to go in rough financial times, but a pilot study using an elective course would let us collect data to show effectiveness.