A News Literacy Project: Interview with Damaso Reyes
by Elena Gkiola
The News Literacy Project (NLP) is a US based NGO that supports young people and students to become critical thinkers and news literate. Increasingly, the work that the organization is doing is focusing on the general public and specifically in helping them understand, interpret and successfully act upon information, within the context of being participants in democratic societies.
Find Out Why talked to NLP’s ambassador in Europe, Damaso Reyes. An experienced journalist himself, in this interview Reyes touches upon the core issues of information quality on digital culture.
Thinking about the concepts of news literacy and media literacy. Are those two distinct concepts?
They are very closely related, with media literacy being a slightly broader concept. News literacy obviously takes a lot from media literacy and it is specifically focusing on how to understand, interpret, appreciate, question, news based information.
Media literacy is a field that talks about how to do those things: How to critically assess, analyze, understand, all media information.
In a nutshell, that is the difference between the two. Although difference is probably even a strong word.
The focus is on information quality. What is the challenge that the organization identified in the first place on that area?
Our founder, Alan Miller, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning former journalist with the Los Angeles Times was inspired to create the organization, after visiting his daughter’s school. Talking about his work as a journalist there he realized that these young citizens, these young future voters really did not understand what journalism was. They did not understand why journalism is important. And this worried him; the next generation of voters really did not have a grasp on this critical part of the information ecosystem. This organization at its heart is trying to help young people understand the world around them by understanding the information around them.
Has the message or the scope changed when social media heavily influenced the information ecosystem?
No. I think that even in the early part of this century, the influence of what we call nontraditional channels of information was still very strong. As the organization (NLP) grew over for the next five to ten years we began seeing more of that [social media influence], but the ideas behind the work that the News Literacy Project does still apply no matter of what information you’re looking at; you could be reading an editorial in the New York Times or you could be reading a Facebook post, but the ideas behind: categorizing information, understanding that different categories of information have different purposes, understanding who is creating this information and what purpose they have behind creating that information, and then being able to critically analyze and assess the actual claims and evidence — those skills are universal and transportable.
This is why I think news literacy and media literacy is so successful, because it actually supports other parts of education, but also supports everything we do in life. Every choice we make, whether it is what kind of cereal to buy or what restaurant to go to or where to take our vacation everything is based on information and if we have poor information we make poor decisions. Helping people to create a filter- create a matrix through which they can analyze information is the universal literacy in the 21st century.
Is information literacy related to journalism?
I think that journalism is a part of information literacy or news literacy. All of these different terms that I am using -information literacy, news literacy, etc.- they are all interrelated. They are all based upon being able to understand information and analyze it. Ultimately as a consumer of information you want to be getting your information from high quality sources.
Do you think that journalists have done a good job explaining to the public what they do?
No. In one word we have not. We are doing a better job than we did ten years ago or twenty years ago. But the truth is, there never was a need to explain what we did or why it was important.
When I was a student, if I wanted to know what happened yesterday, I only had a few channels of information: television, a newspaper or the radio. But if I had to seek out information today, I can pick up my phone and I can get an alert, I can go on Twitter. Basically, I do not have to seek out information because information is seeking me out.
That is a pretty profound difference. The amount of information available to anyone, almost anywhere in the world, is vastly larger than when I was a student.
When I was becoming a journalist there were only a few sources of trustworthy information, or better yet, there were only a few sources of information full stop. You either read the newspaper and believe what they tell you, or you do not.
Now there are lots of alternative sources of information. I think that the unfortunate thing is that for a long time many journalists did not recognize that their primacy, their central role in the information landscape was being eroded.
For more than 100 years the model of our profession was this idea that: “I am a journalist trust me.” Now more of us are recognizing that we do have to explain what we do, how and why we do it. A lot of the things that we think that everyone understands about our field is really not the case. People do not necessarily understand some of the choices that we make as journalists that to us are obvious.
One of the things that the News Literacy Project (NLP) encourages is journalists to engage with the public and especially with young people. NLP does a series of professional development events called “Newslit camps”, which are held free at news organizations with journalists holding sessions. NLP is bringing in educators to these news organizations to talk to journalists about how they do what they do, why they do what they do and why it is important.
For most of the participants, it is the first, and maybe the only, time they actually get to meet and talk to a journalist about their concerns. They get to talk about the questions that they have, and the questions that their students have, when it comes to trusting the media or trusting the news media. So those have obviously a very important role to play in the information ecosystem.
We [journalists] have to make our case to the general public. People are not going to trust us just by default, and they should not. They should hold us accountable. They should question us as much as they question other sources of information. We are not perfect and we have to win the trust of the public. Every day.
What about independent journalists, how do they build their trustworthiness?
What we are seeing with this new part of the news media ecosystem is people coming from various established places, who have established followings, then going independent- at least the ones who tend to be successful. In theory, the people who will be most successful or should be most successful are people who uphold the standards of quality journalism, people who are trustworthy.
I do fear that some journalists are moving more into the world of opinion, they’re moving more into the world of telling a subset of their readers or viewers what they want to hear. As journalists that is not the center of our job.
Obviously if we look in the world of cable TV news or social media, telling people what they want to hear is extremely popular and profitable. However not everything that I want to hear is everything that I need to know. That is an important thing for everyone to recognize.
I have spent my entire career as an independent journalist and I think it is a great thing. At the same time, it is harder to hold yourself accountable and hold yourself to high standards. It is one of the reasons why large news organizations are seen as more trustworthy because they have layers of institutional protection against wrongdoing.
I know when I read something from the New York Times or the Guardian or the BBC that not just one person thought of this and wrote it and then publish it. There are layers of people who looked at it, hopefully assess it, critically ask questions about it and did so on my behalf (as the reader, the viewer etc.).
Do young people respond to those traditional ways of established media outlets?
We have discovered that once you give tools to young people to discern, they are very responsive to it. It is a lot easier to work with young people as well, because their information and media consumption habits have not been set in stone for 20 or 30 years. They are still learning how to consume information.
If you explain that opinion can be ok, but here are a bunch of ways in which people misuse information, or explain the thing we call “logical fallacy”, or explain that if people try to appeal to your emotions maybe they are actually pushing propaganda. One has to understand what the hallmarks are of propaganda. We have to understand what the hallmarks of a good factual, reality based opinion argument is and why news is different. And why analysis this different and why entertainment and advertising are different. All those categories of information are blurred today. And it is really hard to tell -if you are not trained- the difference between news, opinion, advertising, propaganda, entertainment. if one cannot tell the difference between those categories, it is easy for them to be manipulated by disseminators of disinformation who understand those differences very clearly and are using them against us.
We are seeing an information warfare online. Sometimes corporations are trying to manipulate us into buying their products, sometimes this happens by governments, foreign or domestic, local or national. Sometimes it happens by trolls who just want to disrupt things. There are people who have weaponized information and they are using it to manipulate segments of our society and to cause great damage as they do. Sometimes they are doing it for profit, sometimes for ideology, and sometimes they are doing it just to cause disruption and to see the world burn.
Nevertheless, if you are protected against that you are far less likely to become a victim. In fact, you become empowered, because you cannot be manipulated.
Empowerment needs training. It is a process that takes time. Can you share with us what is the process of NLP?
There is a reason why we call it news literacy or media literacy or information literacy. If you think about how long it took to learn whatever your native language is: you learn to speak it, then you learn to write it, you learn to read it, but that takes years. We spend years in primary school and secondary school learning and refining these skills to the point where we are quite fluent.
Media literacy is very similar. For the NLP, the flagship product: “Checkology”, is an interactive online virtual classroom that consists of more than thirteen different lessons that focus on different aspects of information and news literacy. Everything from how to sort and categorize information to the difference between news and opinion, what the standards of quality journalism are, what is the role of free press in a democratic society etc.
Citizens play a role in being watchdogs and journalists do that as well. We have a lesson that focuses on bias and how to spot it and how to understand your own biases as well. There is also a lesson that focuses on algorithms and how they can manipulate and change the information that we see.
In addition there are lessons that focus on opinion and opinion based arguments and on how to spot those logical fallacies that are often used by folks who do not have solid opinion based arguments.
It really covers a wide variety of issues about how to understand information, and it is designed to be used by educators or parents or anyone who works with young people.
We have got more than twenty five thousand teachers using it in all fifty states in the United States and over 100 countries around the world. So to us it is sort of a testament to the need of educators for this kind of work.
The biggest challenge that educators face is that they are not necessarily specialists on news or information literacy. Providing them with a very robust tool that helps them introduce these concepts is thus fundamental. News literacy, information literacy and media literacy are really the foundations of critical thinking.
What is that you personally value in this organization and you are part of it?
I actually first got in touch with the NLP as a volunteer. One of the things that the organization does is to connect journalists with students who are studying news literacy in person or virtually. I would visit classrooms and talk to students about my work as a journalist and why journalism is important. I really enjoyed that as a journalist. When I returned to New York, I was looking for a job and there was an opening within this organization that I had been volunteering with. So for me it was a very natural fit.
If there is going to be a future to journalism, we have to educate the next generation as to why journalism is important. If we are going to have a future in democracy, we have to educate the next generation that facts exist and are important and they can be interpreted in many different ways. Increasingly, we are seeing people, governments, individuals, corporations who are willing to subvert and undermine this concept of fact in order to pursue their own selfish aims.
As an organization, the NLP is committed to facts. It is committed to helping people understand the world around them and as a journalist that appealed to me and it still does.
Where do you see the organization the next five years? What are the biggest challenges? But also what is the opportunity?
The organization has grown over the past five years, that I have been associated with it. It has grown in terms of staff size and in terms of reach. When I first joined the organization “Checkology” had just debuted and it has gone from zero educators to tens of thousands around the world.
The goal of the organization is to see news literacy embedded in the American educational system. There is a long way to go for that. It is also dedicated to seeing news literacy spread around the world. There is a very long way to go with that, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity.
Teachers, parents and legislators are increasingly concerned about misinformation and disinformation and are trying to find ways to counter it. We think that news literacy should be at the core of any approach to finding this information. Nevertheless, it is still a relatively new field and it is still a relatively new concept, so there is still a lot of friction and resistance to adopting it.
We have seen misinformation and disinformation spread like wildfire over the past six years. NLP’s work in this field is to prepare the land, prepare people to understand different types of information so they are able to critically assess information and then also hopefully understand and appreciate why news should be sought out as a primary source of information.
We assume that young people live in the type of age when no one should need to explain those differences, because those are learned by osmosis. This is a huge fallacy and this is completely incorrect. In the last twenty years, the way we consume information and the amount of information that is available to us is hugely different. We as adults, parents, teachers, as policymakers need to accept that, and we need to begin to change the way we teach our young people to deal with the world that they live in, to deal with the information landscape that they exist in, not the one that we grew up in, which is gone, which does not exist anymore.
How we here in the Netherlands and in Europe can access NLP’s tools like “Checkology” or “Informable” app?
Anywhere and anyone in the world can go to newslit.org ,the News Literacy Project’s main website. There are tools and resources there for the general public for free. These tools are primarily in English. One of the things we are definitely hoping to do is to create different versions of “Checkology” in different languages. Nevertheless, if you happen to teach in an English language school, or you are dealing with English proficient students you can sign up for “Checkology” and you can use it. You will find it is really an incredibly robust platform and incredibly user -designed platform. It is one of the best, not just because I have worked with NLP, but I think within the landscape of tools, interactive tools, especially within the media literacy landscape, I do think it is really the best.
