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3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

To help teenagers and their teachers approach each of these steps, we have created a kind of lesson plan below. Each section is written directly to students, but each also ends with tips for teachers who may be doing this as a class project.

Questions? Let us know in the comments, and thank you for participating.

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Set the Stage: Think about what "news" means to you and what you want from it.

Before you begin the three steps below, we want to make an important point: it doesn't matter how little (or how much) news you consume as you begin this process. What does matter is whether you can answer the question of why you are following the news.

Be honest with yourself: What does news mean to you? You may not remember a time when the news wasn't available online, but because it is, a lot of what informs us isn't necessarily coming from traditional news organizations. News can come from many places - and sometimes it feels like it's coming from everywhere all at once.

So...is it headlines in a newspaper like The Times or breaking news on CNN? Is it links friends or relatives post in your social feeds, or discussions during lunch or at your dinner table? Is it what you view on Snapchat? What you watch on YouTube? Links your mom shares with you? Threads you follow on Reddit or accounts on Tumblr? Texts from your friends about what people in your school are doing? All of the above?

Now think about how news has played a role in your life up until now. Alone or in conversation with others, see if you can come up with an example for each of these...

* A memory from your childhood of hearing important breaking news, and its effect on you and those around you.

* A recent breaking news item that got your attention.

* A time when you were embarrassed not to know about something in the news.

* A time when you used news of some kind to help you in a practical way.

* A time when you felt a personal connection to news about a person, place, event or issue.

* A time you've shared a news item, whether via word of mouth, a social feed, email or in any other way.

* A time when news overwhelmed, angered or upset you.

* A time when knowledge of something in the news provided you with "social currency." That is, your friends, family or community was interested in it, and knowing about it enriched your relationships or helped you build new ones.

Finally, answer the question, "Why do I want to consume news?" Again, be as honest with yourself as you can. For instance, you might answer:

* I want to be up-to-date on news about a place, group of people, issue or aspect of culture that I care about or am personally connected to.

* I don't want seem like I don't know what is going on in the world because it's embarrassing.

* I want to find "news I can use" on a specific topic or issue.

* I want to be entertained.

* I feel like following news will help me academically - or in a future job.

* I know I should read the news even though I don't really want to, so I'm willing to give this experiment a try.

You might also think about why you don't want to follow news or what you are not interested in. Maybe you've avoided it because it can be overwhelming, because you don't feel you have enough background knowledge to understand it, or because news right now can feel too divisive to discuss with your friends or family.

If so, you might relate to what Jihii Jolly, one of the authors of this lesson, writes in her essay " Why We Read the News (and how to do it)." She describes how she felt about news when she was a teenager:

I grew increasingly bothered by how up and down the news would make me feel. At times I'd be inspired by a part of the world I would never otherwise have access to. At other times, I felt completely lost following a story I just didn't have the time or context needed to really get. And at others, I felt numb, in a sort of haze of "I know a little bit about a lot of unpleasant things and have no agency to do anything about them."

Teachers: If you would like to have your class think about these questions and do these prompts together, you might first invite them to take some on via writing privately.

Students could then share some of their answers in small groups and, later define "news" as a class. Together everyone might come up with a list of reasons people might follow news - and why they might not.

You might also have them read all of Ms. Jolly's essay, about her own history as a news reader.

Step 1: Do a news audit to see if your current news consumption habits are helping you fulfill your intentions.

Once you've defined for yourself what news means to you and why you want to follow it (or why you're avoiding it), take 24 to 48 hours to closely observe the information that comes to you right now, and where it comes from.

To do this, you might keep a chart of some kind, creating as many columns as you like depending on what you want to observe.

For instance you can make a simple two-column chart that shows what news you're taking in and where it comes from. Be sure to list all sources of information and how you're consuming them, including TV, social media, newspapers, radio, online videos, websites, apps, and the specific people who tell, text or email you news, however you're defining it.

But we recommend adding two other columns so that you can better use this chart as a reflective tool. First, a column in which you rate or comment on how reliable you think the information is and why, and second, a column for open-ended comments that you can use to jot down emotional reactions, questions, patterns you notice, or anything else that seems important.

Would you like some examples?

* We have created a sample chart with the columns we recommend. However, we hope you'll customize your own chart as you decide what you'd like to notice and note.

* To help us with our challenge, a class of eighth graders in Asheville, N.C., has also done their own news audits. Here is the handout their teacher, Katie Dulaney, created; and here, in these three photos, are three sample student answers.

Teachers: If your students are doing this exercise as a class, you might decide that everyone should have the same columns. They might also all conduct their news audits in the same 24- or 48-hour period, and discuss their results in small groups. What do they discover? What sources do many have in common? Why do they like following them? What stories did many follow in common? What seems to be lacking in their news diets? Why? What might they do about that?

If you are having students add a column about reliability of sources to their charts, you might want to devote a lesson to the issue, perhaps by using a resource like the News Literacy Project. Their free Checkology Virtual Classroom program can teach students how to determine if news is trustworthy. Other ideas? You can also use this chart or the E.S.C.A.P.E. Junk News poster and related lesson plan, all from the Newseum, or any of our own lessons plans on the topic, which you can find in Additional Resources, below.

Step 2: Change your news diet to make it meet your needs.

Now that you've spent 24-to 48 hours noticing what news you already follow, think about what would make it better for you. What would you like to add, subtract or change? Why? How can you come up with a mix that will improve your life?

This step invites you to follow the news intentionally and construct a diet to match those intentions, much like we construct food diets to nourish our unique physical needs as human beings.

Think about things like discovery, time, location, and what you'll do with the news after you consume it. For example, maybe your biggest problem is that you just don't know how to find great journalism that you actually care about it because it doesn't show up in your apps or feeds. Or, maybe you regularly discover interesting things but simply don't have the time to enjoy it - because who actually has 45 minutes to read a 5,000-word story on a Tuesday? Or, you may just prefer to read a book or watch a movie when you have free time because they give you that satisfying, relaxing feeling of having a clear beginning, middle and end. In that case, is there a news outlet out there that can give you a neat beginning, middle and end to catch up?

Here are some steps you can take. Together they may take you a week or more since you may have to repeat them until the mix feels right.
A) Ask yourself, What kinds of news or sources should I have in my daily diet?
What is missing from my list? What do I have too much of, and what might I not have enough of? What new topics do I want to learn more about? What new sources could I explore? How reliable is the news I'm getting now? How balanced? How representative of a variety of points of view and experiences? How useful for my everyday life?

Nearly everyone who writes about news literacy recommends getting news from a variety of sources to ensure what you're taking in is trustworthy. In this Guide to Understanding the News and Making Good Choices, for instance, The Lamp, a New York City media literacy organization, writes:

Where should I get my news?

Perhaps the best answer, for now, is that you should try to get your news from a variety of sources. Variety here means variety in the media forms you choose and variety in the types of messages you choose. In other words, If you tend to get all of your news from cable television, you might supplement that by adding some newspaper time into the mix, or maybe spend a little bit of time listening to a public radio station to find out what they're reporting. Likewise, if you tend to get all of your news from one newspaper, you might consider turning on a cable TV news channel occasionally to see how they are presenting some of the stories you've been following in print. If the internet is your sole source of news, consider comparing what you read at the websites of major news organizations, with you might read at some blog sites, or on social networking sites like Facebook, or video sites such as YouTube.

It's always good to vary the perspective of your news sources as well. A big part of news literacy is understanding that there really is no such thing as an objective point of view in news, and that all news sources, because of technologies and because of personal, organizational and economic considerations, have their own way of shaping news.

So look at the mix of sources in your news audit and experiment with adding new ones that address any imbalances you notice.

* For example, you might have discovered that the majority of the news you get is skewed to either the political left or right, and, in a desire to get out of your " filter bubble," maybe you'd like an ideological mix. If so, here is a resource from the University of Michigan that can help: What news sources are left-leaning, centrist, or right-leaning?

* Or, maybe you've decided that you'd like to get a global view via more international news - or, conversely, maybe you'd like to focus more locally, on your own city, town or even neighborhood.

* Is there a topic you'd like to follow in depth - say, coverage of a particular community, issue or trend? If so, seek out and add sources that will tell you more about that, or compare the ways different sources handle it.

* Or, you might just want to add more "news you can use" to improve your life - whether health and nutrition information, news about college, careers or hobbies, or anything else.

Assess your list to see if it helps you achieve the goals you set out to achieve. For example, if you want to understand exactly what is happening in Russia and why that country's relationship with the United States is so complicated, why is over 50% of your news consumption about baseball? Or, if you want to understand someone whose politics are different than yours, are you reading any news sources that they follow to understand their worldview? Do you know anything about the communities where those voters live and how they might be different from your own?

B) You can also consider how you get your news. Maybe you want to exclusively use your smartphone, or maybe you want to use a computer. You might like to read the paper or magazines in print because your family subscribes. If you're on your phone, you might decide to use several different news apps - or that you want one app that will aggregate a lot of sources. Here is a list of news discovery apps that aggregate sources that might be a place to start.

Or, do you want to read the news through your email instead of an app, via a newsletter like The New York Times Morning Briefing? Maybe you just want to watch videos or listen to radio. Or, perhaps you want more news on platforms you already use for social purposes, like Snapchat or Instagram. What should you add? See what feels right.

C) You might need to revisit s teps a and b, above, a few times before you get it right. Maybe you got enthusiastic and added too much news at the beginning of this step. Or, you could be getting news at the wrong time of day or on the wrong platform. Fiddle around until your system and sources work for you. Try to find a mix that feels useful, enjoyable, interesting or important, then live with it for a while and see how it affects you. After all, even if you're doing this for a school assignment, the goal of this exercise is to apply it to your real life.

Teachers: If you are doing this step in class, you might invite students to brainstorm in small groups about what kinds of news they would like to find, then conduct research to surface new sources. As part of the process, you might share your own news diet.

You could also invite a range of people from around the school or community to come to class and share their own daily news habits and sources, and encourage students on their own to interview people they respect to find even more. Together, you might create a long list of options in a Google doc which everyone can edit.

Step 3: Reflect on your experiences before and after you experimented with your news diet, and sum up how you see the role of news in your life now.

First, live with your new news diet for a week or so, and notice what happens. Next, reflect on the change.

If you are participating in our news challenge, this "reflection" step is key to your submission since you'll ultimately turn it into a short essay or video that you'll submit to us by Dec. 22, 2017.

But even if you aren't doing this for our challenge, thinking about this exercise and what you discovered can help you figure out a healthy way to navigate the stream of news in your life.

Here are a few questions to help:

* Where did you start? What did your news audit reveal about your habits and sources and the role of news in your life at the beginning of exercise?

* What happened when you experimented with your news diet? How did it impact your daily life? What stood out from the experience?

* What didn't work for you? What mistakes did you make? What was difficult?

* Will you continue to experiment with your news diet? What may be the right mix for you? Why?

* What notable reactions to individual news items or topics did you have along the way?

* What does this exercise leave you noticing, wondering or thinking about the role of news in your life in general? Is the right mix of news making your life better somehow?

* Do you want to do anything with the news you consumed? Share it in an email or on a social feed? Write about it yourself somehow? Get involved in an issue? What could you do?

* What was most notable, useful or interesting about this experience?

* If you are participating in our challenge, how can you make some of these answers clear in an essay or video? How can you tell the story of what happened before and after you experimented with your news diet? What can you say overall about the role of news in your life now? How can you make sure what you create reflects your personality and unique process? Does your final product follow our rubric?

Teachers: If you are guiding students' final projects to turn in for our challenge, you might now have them answer some or all of the questions above individually first, perhaps just as a freewrite.

Then, they might work in groups to share their answers. Please note that we allow submissions from individuals, or from groups of up to five. While writing personal essays might be tricky in a group, group video-making may be a fun way to approach the project. How can they bring their insights together into one piece? How can they show visually what they learned? You might allow students to choose whether they'd like to work alone or in groups, and whether an essay or a video feels more natural.

Whatever they're creating, encourage them to be honest about the process and what they discovered. We are looking for pieces in which individual voices and personalities come through, and we're more interested in the insights they gleaned from the experience than anything else. Show them our rubric to help them see what's most important to our judges.

But as we say in the contest rules, we hope students also know that they are allowed to have a sense of humor about the project, and take creative risks of all kinds. We've never done a challenge like this before, and we can't wait to be surprised.
On Variety in News Sources and Reading News Today
Thank you for participating!

Additional Resources

Teaching Tolerance | Digital and Civic Literacy Skills

The Lamp | Guide to Understanding the News and Making Good Choices

University of Michigan | What news sources are left-leaning, centrist, or right-leaning?

TED Talk | Beware Online Filter Bubbles

New Literacy Project | Our Intern's Path to News Literacy
On Reliability of News Sources
The Newseum | Today's Front Pages (from newspapers around the U.S. and around the world)

Slate | The Year in Push Alerts: How the onslaught in breaking news has shaped our lives since Nov. 8, 2016

The News Literacy Project | Checkology Digital Classroom and The Sift Newsletter

Newseum | Virtual Class: Fighting Fake News: How to Outsmart Trolls and Troublemakers

The Learning Network | Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

The Learning Network | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources

The Learning Network | Ideas for E.L.L.s: Finding Reliable Sources in a World of 'Fake News'
Our student challenge, and this related lesson plan, were originally inspired by "How To Read the News While You're in High School," a 2015 essay on Medium by the journalist Jihii Jolly, who is currently at work on a book about this topic. Learning Network editor Katherine Schulten asked Ms. Jolly to collaborate in recasting her work into a format that could be used in classrooms.
PBS Newshour | Misinformation Overload: Teens Reveal Perceptions and Impact of Misinformation

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Improving Your 'News Diet': A Three-Step Lesson Plan for Teenagers and Teachers

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3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

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The problem of fake news came to a dizzying head in 2016 when a man fired a shot in a family pizzeria as he "self-investigated" a false report of a child abuse ring led by top democrats. A BuzzFeed report confirmed that fake news stories, such as the one that claimed Hillary Clinton sold arms to ISIS, were actually viewed more times than articles from established and legitimate news sources. Did fake news have an impact on the election? How do we address the problem from here? This lesson plan features a Channel One News report on the problem. Then, students analyze the problem and consider steps media outlets and individuals need to take to prevent the viral spread of propaganda.

Opening Activity

Warm up: Ask students:

How do you get your news?

If you get it from social media, can you name the news sources where the information you read comes from?

What have you heard about fake news? Why are people concerned about it?

Words in the News: Review this word prior to viewing the video.

propaganda(noun): Information that is often exaggerated or false and spread for the purpose of benefiting or promoting a specific individual or cause.

Heard on the Air: "If we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems."

Watch Video: "Fake News on Facebook"

Discuss

Why did people, particularly the teens in Macedonia, create fake news sites? [to make money]

How are Facebook and Google addressing the problem? [blocking sites from making money off of advertising]

Do you agree with President Obama's assertion that "we have problems" if we cannot tell the difference between real news and propaganda? Why or why not?

Take a Survey

Have students scan their social media newsfeeds to spot suspect articles. Then, have them use this checklist from the News Literacy Project, Ten Questions for Fake News Detection, to determine whether they've spotted an illegitimate news source.

Then, work with the whole class to create a list of sites that they evaluated. List the sites, and create columns for read, "liked," or shared. Perform a class-wide survey to see how many times people read, "liked" or shared an article from each site.

Based on the results of the survey, ask students:

Were you surprised to learn that any of the sites were actually fake news sites?

If you shared any articles from the site, what was the result? Did people like, comment or share the article from your social media page? Did you see this activity on other people's social media pages? What types of behaviors did you notice?

What impact do you think fake news has had on you, or on people in your life?

What impact do you think fake news sites had on the election?

Now that you know these sites are fake, what actions might you take to lessen the harm of misinformation?

Write

What impact do you think fake news had on the 2016 Presidential Election? What steps should the government, media outlets and individuals take to address the problem? Write an essay exploring the issue. Support your answer with evidence from the video, the class survey and your own experience.
Premium subscribers get access to the Channel One News video library, daily show and daily lesson plans.

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The problem of fake news came to a dizzying head in 2016 when a man fired a shot in a family pizzeria as he "self-investigated" a false report of a child abuse ring led by top democrats.

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Report: Teen's Online Information Reasoning Skills

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Report: Teen's Online Information Reasoning Skills

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Five Key Questions Form Foundation for Media Inquiry

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In the MediaLit Kit ™, the Center for Media Literacy identifies Five Key Questions as the core of our inquiry-based media literacy pedagogy. Where do they come from? Like so many good ideas that evolve slowly over time, they are simply an innovative recasting of the Five Core Concepts which the early media literacy field adapted, in turn, from traditional categories of rhetorical and literary analysis.

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Challenge your friends!

Real or Fake photo Game

Play the Real or Fake photo free online game! Can you guess whether the photo is real or faked? The game will display 15 photos, some are originals and some have been retouched, edited, or 'Photoshopped'. For each picture click on the appropriate button to submit your answer. If the photo was faked, the game will show you the before and after versions. How many can you get correct? Compete to achieve the highest quiz accuracy. Share your high score and challenge your friends to take the quiz!

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Real or Fake photo Game - Play the Game - Take the Quiz!

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Can you guess whether the photo is real or faked? The game will display 20 photos, for each picture click on the appropriate button to submit your answer. If the photo was faked, the game will show you the before and after versions. How many can you get correct?

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Top 10 sites to help students check their facts

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In a political climate where sharing fake news has become commonplace, it's more important than ever to rely on trustworthy and dogged fact-checking services to vet information. Our job as digital citizens requires more than just being informed. We must also be vigilant about verifying information before posting it on social media.

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Outline of Teaching Resources and Activities

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Outline of Teaching Resources and Activities

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses.

But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth.

News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news. All of this is compounded by the glories and the drawbacks of user-generated content, citizen journalism, and a world of new news choices.

Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. (The Verification Handbooks are a wonderful lens into this complicated process.) The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics lists four guiding principles; the first of which is seek truth and report it.

Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction.

And word choice itself is connected to truth. Over the course of the last decade we've seen professional news organizations and governments struggle with the politics and potential loadedness of words, notably terrorist and illegal immigrant. (See the AP Stylebook Blog and Reuters Handbook of Journalism.)
On news literacy
In its glossary, Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as:

The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

Our kids need new types of filters. Beyond larger notions of information literacy, I see the case for a specific focus on news literacy. Not as a lesson of good vs. bad. Not as an attempt to pitch traditional media against social media or peer review against popular publication. Not through the examination of hoaky hoax sites. And certainly not as a one-of, checklist type of lesson for a 9th grade social studies teacher in September.

We need to teach the important lessons of everyday civics for new consumption and production landscapes. These lessons involve sustained critical thinking, a practice to engage in regularly as we read and view and inquire with learners of all ages acros s disciplines.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy assessed the news literacy of students from middle school through college.

Students were asked to perform such tasks as: determine the trustworthiness of tweets, distinguish between news articles and opinion columns, identify ads on a news website, compare and evaluate posts from a newspaper's comment section, identify the blue checkmark that distinguishes a verified Facebook account from a fake one, consider the relative strength of evidence presented by two posters in a Facebook exchange, decide whether or not to trust a photo on a photo-sharing website, determine whether a website can be trusted in an open web search, search to verify a claim about a controversial issue, assess the reliability of a partisan website, identify the strengths and weaknesses of an online video. (p. 6) (Note: Most of these tasks could authentically be taught in our libraries during the natural course of any inquiry project.)

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners' political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who's behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation . . .

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish. (pp. 5-6)

I see a serious need for librarians to build a few seaworthy arks from the news media flood to aid students in discerning credibility, reliability, and bias in context of their information needs and the context of the text itself. I can see us introducing the broad notion of triangulation to children for whom the word may be difficult to say.
What's going on? Fake news
In the weeks leading up to the election we were drawn to stories about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and WikiLeaks' confirmation that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

Fake news is not new. But its potential for virality is and our awareness of it is newly awakened. Some suggested it played a role in the outcome of the election. Google and Facebook both announced that they would try to eliminate fake news from appearing in their result lists and newsfeeds by blocking fake news sources from using their ad networks.

This video TEDEd by Damon Brown offers a student-friendly explanation as well as strategies for analyzing news sources:

And fake news is but one flavor of news that is less than accurate. It is but one bucket into which readers and viewers should sort types of truthiness.

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

Pure fake news sites use fabricated stories to lure traffic, encourage clicks (click bait), influence or profit using intentionally deceptive, but highly intriguing, often sensational information.

Hoax sites also share false information with the intention to trick readers/viewers

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

Born digital images and edited images alter and often misrepresent visual reality

In addition, sometimes journalists just get things wrong. Their sources they choose to interview may not offer truth or a full picture. Stories reported in process lack the wisdom of hindsight and may be missing full context.
Post-truth or truthiness
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. Oxford defines the word as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

It is well worth noting that the concept is not new. Oxford traces post-truth's history from a peripheral term simmering for at least a decade to its dramatic spike this year: in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particu lar noun, in the phrase "post-truth politics."

Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

While we need to reject the notion of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.

Credibility decisions are complicated. Most news is not simply fake or true. News from traditional sources can be suspect as well. Professional journalists engage in rigorous fact-checking and adhere to sets of professional ethics, but they are not entirely immune to bias or agenda or the pressures of a deadline. A single story may tell a part of a larger story at the moment of its publishing. Of course, traditional newspapers feature writing of all sorts-straight reporting, editorials, features, columns, advertisements and comments in their digital versions. Several traditional news sources are to various degrees either right or left leaning. While some admit their bias, others do not.

It is impossible to dismiss the complication that our political news consumption habits have shifted. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in disseminating political information during the past election season. A May 2016 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In terms of the total population, this translates to social media news reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. Consider this results of this report in the context of with the decline of the newspaper industry also documented by recent Pew Research Center data.

Some Rules of thumb:

Check About and About me pages: Clicking on or investigate authors names to consider their credentials in context should be a regular part of the research journey. (See other tricks below.)

Interrogate urls: We see quite a bit of domain manipulation these days. For instance, what looks like an .edu domain, followed by .co or "lo" is likely a fake or deceptive site. If you are you seeing a slightly variant version of a well-known URL, do a little investigating.

Suspect the sensational: When we see something posted that looks sensational, it is even more important to be skeptical. Exaggerated and provocative headlines with excessive use of capital letters or emotional language are serious red flags.

Go back to the source: When an article mentions a study, if you can, go directly to the source and check its bona fides as well.

Go back to the story again (and again): When was the story written? What is its context? Breaking news will continue to break. Early reports are built from limited information so you'll want to watch a story grow into a fuller picture.

Think outside the reliability box: The old checklist-type tools we used to evaluate websites do not necessarily work. ACRL's Framework reminds us that the notion of reliability can be fluid. Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. On Twitter's 10th birthday this year, Poynter, the respected journalism portal, listed 10 Twitter How Tos -guides for using Twitter for journalism from its own archive. Students can benefit from these tips too.

Triangulate: Try to verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases. You can begin to rule out the hoaxes by checking out sites like the nonprofit, nonpartisan FactCheck.org, or popular sites like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer.

What exactly are you reading?: Even when you find yourself in a traditional news site, identify what type of writing you are reading. Is it news reporting, or a feature story, or an editorial, or work by a guest blogger, or a review, or an op-ed or a disguised ad, or a comment?

Check your own search attitude and biases: Is your search language biased in any way? Are you paying more attention to the information that confirms your own beliefs and ignoring evidence that does not?

Use a little energy: Have you simply satisficed or have you done your due diligence in seeking and validating the best possible sources across media sources?

Stop before you forward (or use): When you see a widely shared or forwarded link, be suspicious of a hoax or a fake story. Can you verify the information outside of the social media platform on which you discovered it?

Be suspicious of pictures!: Not all photographs tell truth or unfiltered truth. Images are normally edited or process, but sometimes they are digitally manipulated. Some are born digital. A Google reverse image search can help discover the source of an image and its possible variations.

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

Infographics are carefully constructed visual media messages. The data, the evidence, the sources, and the arguments they present beg careful deconstruction, scrutiny and analysis. (See my post.)
Some news literacy vocabulary to introduce in talking about credibility:

cloaked sites appear unbiased and professional but actually advocate on behalf of an organization or cause while concealing their true sources of funding and purpose.

confirmation bias: the tendency to believe information is credible if it conforms to the reader's/viewer's existing belief system, or not credible if it does not conform

container collapse: my own term for our trouble discerning the original information container, format or information type-blog, book, pamphlet, government document, chapter, magazine, newspaper, journal, or section of the newspaper or magazine or journal-once publishing cues are removed and every source looks like a digital page or a printout.

content farm or content mill: a company that employs a staff of freelance writers to create content designed to satisfy search engine retrieval algorithms with the goal of attracting views and advertising revenue.

In news media an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an "enclosed" system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresentedecho chamber: "." (Wikipedia)

fact checking: the act of verifying assertions either prior to publication or after dissemination of the content

filter bubble: When search tools present with the stories we are likely to click on or share based on our past activity, potentially affirming our biases, we need may be experiencing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble,

herding phenomenon: as more journalists begin to cover a story, even more journalists are likely to join the herd, imitating the angle the story initially took rather than developing alternate or original approaches or angles.

native advertising: paid, sponsored content designed to look like the legitimate content produced by the media outlet

satisficing: a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice introduced by Herbert Simon in 1956 to refer to the tendency of people, bounded by time limitations, to select good enough information over optimal information

sockpuppet: an online identify created to pose as a party unaffiliated with the media puppeteer in order to deceive.

triangulation or cross verification: Researchers establish validity by using several research methods and by analyzing and examining multiple perspectives and sources in the hope that diverse viewpoints will can shed greater light on a topic.

virality: the rapid circulation of media from one user to another. When we forward sensational stories, often from social media without checking their credibility in other sources, we increase their virality.

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Though aimed at university students, this important document reframes the way we consider authority and is well worth examining with high school students and faculty. The Framework recommends the following student dispositions:Learners who are developing their information literate abilities

develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives;

motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be conferred or manifested in unexpected ways;

develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview;

question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews;

are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources: a dynamic Google Doc filled with tips from Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College.

The Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University's School of Journalism, offers an impressive Digital Resources Center that includes

Ripped from the Headlines: Fresh news literacy lessons, based on the latest news, ready to use in class

Course Pack: organized around eight major concepts, the 14-module curriculum takes students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program. Don't miss the very useful new Glossary.

Get a Global View: Instructional resources from the Center's international partners

DIY News Literacy Lessons: Inspiration and lessons templates for creating your own instruction around news literacy concepts.

News Literacy Project: Begun by an LA Times investigative reporter and supported by several newspapers and news organizations, the NLP is an innovative national education program that equips middle school and high school students with the tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens. Don't miss the four modules, lessons and Check Tool in the Checkology Virtual Classroom.

NewseumED: Learning tools on media literacy. Don't miss the Resources for Promoting Dialogue Post Election and Today's Front Pages

Center for Media Literacy: Dedicated to leadership, education and professional development, the pioneering CML offers a free Global OnRamp (in multiple languages) built around its research-based framework and five key questions for deconstructing and constructing media.

Media Education Lab: Teaching Resources: The University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media offers a wealth of resources. Don't miss Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced website that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics, as well as the six-lesson CCSS-aligned high school curriculum unit on contemporary propaganda.

Frank Baker's Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Don't miss the Media's Role in Politics

Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting: Aimed at professional journalists, but very useful for high school, this companion to the Verification Handbook for Emergency Coverage, which addresses breaking news, provides the fundamentals of online search and research techniques for investigations and takes a deeper into techniques for user generated content investigations

Time For Kids shares a video News Matters in which 6th graders discuss what they are learning about critical thinking and the news. critically about the information they come across.

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments an open access resource for faculty and librarians

Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources NYTimes Learning Network

SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy

Teaching Information Literacy Now, from SLJ Librarian of the Year finalist, Laura Gardner

Fake 'News' in a 'Post-truth' World from reflection from Professor Judi Moreillon who shares: Fake "news" and a "post-truth" world call all school librarians to step up and lead

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

FactCheck.org: Annenberg Public Policy Center's nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. Check out the post That Chain E-Mail Your Friend Sent to You is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously, for its Key Characteristics of Bogusness and the Viral Spiral page for claims previously checked

Washington Post's Fact Checker: The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to "truth squad" the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

PolitiFact.com: a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics, run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times. (Note: I discovered their truth-o-meter after I created the little image for this post.)

Snopes: Since way back in the 90s, Snopes has been dispelling urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Hoax-Slayer: Australian Brett Christensen has been debunking email and social media hoaxes and spam since 2003

Craig Silverman's BuzzFeed blog: The founding editor for BuzzFeed, Canada has been writing for many years for a variety of publications on media accuracy and verification issues.

Whois Lookup: This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website

CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose posted by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

Does This Website Smell Funny to You? Amy Gillespie's FART test posted in Knowledge Quest will grab middle schoolers' attention

Evaluating Sources Using the RADAR Framework: RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478.

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

Abilock, Debbie. (2012). True-or not?. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 70-74. Debbie shares her quick and dirty rules of thumb-digital reading strategies, in fact-that will intrigue students, spark their curiosity, and serve as sensible entry points to more sophisticated analyses of ideas. Don't miss the section on Weighing Truths in Wikipedia.

Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy.

Stebbins, Leslie F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Stevenson, Sara. (2016). Information Literacy Lessons Crucial in a Post Truth World. Knowledge Quest.
And finally . . .
Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information. We teach them to deconstruct media messages and construct their own messages. We teach them to interrogate their sources. As the landscape continues to shift, librarians must update our own skill sets and toolkits to guide students in navigating a growingly nuanced universe of news. We must also examine and recognize our own biases so that we are open to contrary and conflicting ideas. This is our banner to wave, our curriculum to co-teach.

Of course, following the paths I've described for critical vetting of the news is work!

This is a new landscape from the one we taught in even five years ago. We need new compasses for navigation.

I do not believe we can stem the tide of fake news and truthiness and political memes and viral rumors and quick rushes to judgment. I do believe that together we can build a few arks.

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world - NeverEndingSearch

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make [...]

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Ernie Pyle, the great WWII reporter, once said, "If you want to tell the story of a war, tell the story of one soldier."

He was highlighting, of course, the importance of focusing on stories, and on the human scale of the event. We might feel that way about telling the story of a school year. There is just so much we could cover in our student media that we don't know where to begin, but what if we focused on one student at a time, on one day her life?

Or what if we simply focused on ONE DAY in the rich tapestry that is a school year?

That's the thinking behind the newest CSMA challenge for our members. We have chosen our ONE DAY to be Friday, Feb. 9, and we hope your students will have some fun, and perhaps uncover some stories that would otherwise slip by us.

A print news staff can produce one double page spread, whatever paper size you normally use, with the only requirement being that everything on that spread must be from Feb. 9.

A yearbook staff would have the same challenge, producing a spread (perhaps based on the same design approach as the 2018 book).

A video staff can produce a video of the day, with a two-minute maximum length.

An online staff can enter up to 20 URLs demonstrating how they covered the day, whether through website posts or social media, or some combination.

Everyone can take part, and each CSMA member medium may submit one entry. There will be categories for each of our four media types, and we will offer small and large enrollment classifications ("small" is under 1,700 students, just FYI).

Once the reporting has been completed, you have plenty of time to edit, write, proof, design, etc. Entries may be uploaded to our contest site ( betternewspapercontests.com) anytime from Feb. 10-21. Please download this Word document with step-by-step instructions for entering this contest. These instruction will look very familiar to those who have entered Best of Colorado awards in the past.

Entries will be judged by experts, and winners will receive special certificates of commendation. Results will be announced in early March.

But everyone will be a winner if we produce great reporting on ONE DAY in the life of your school community, particularly if you find some way to share your work with your community.

CSMA wants to share your work even more widely, and will produce a compilation of all the entries, shared through our website.

We know this can be a tough time of year for many staffs, with looming deadlines and the accumulation of work they have already produced. But we offer this as a change of pace, as a new challenge, and as a different approach to journalism in your school.

We can't wait to see what everyone produces!

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ONE DAY coverage contest focuses on Friday, Feb. 9

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Ernie Pyle, the great WWII reporter, once said, "If you want to tell the story of a war, tell the story of one soldier." He was highlighting, of course, the importance of focusing on stories, and on the human scale of the event. We might feel that way about telling the story of a school...

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As librarians everywhere will attest, fake news is not new; fabricated stories have been presented as truth for centuries. But take a divided electorate and add a social media landscape where misinformation is shared with a click, and interest in the topic has soared.

Learning to decipher fact from fiction is a key skill for all news consumers, and libraries across the country are stepping up to help patrons gain the information literacy skills they need. With that in mind, Programming Librarian has compiled the following round-up of resources* to help libraries deliver their best programming about fake news.

Do you have other go-to resources that are not listed below? Please share them in the comments or email us at programminglibrarian@ala.org.

Webinars

"Don't Get Faked Out by the News," American Association of School Librarians, Feb. 23, 2017; available for free viewing to all until March 2, 2017; available to AASL members and eCOLLAB subscribers thereafter

"Fake News Workshop," University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of information Sciences, Feb. 1, 2017; select "Slides/Audio"

LibGuides and resources

"Fake News," Indiana University East Campus Library

News

Further reading
*Thanks to Nicole A. Cooke of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign iSchool for providing several of these resources. Check out Dr. Cooke's Programming Librarian webinar, "Post-Truth: Fake News and a New Era of Information Literacy."

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As librarians everywhere will attest, fake news is not new; fabricated stories have been presented as truth for centuries. But take a divided electorate and add a social media landscape where misinformation is shared with a click, and interest in the topic has soared.