‘Rebooting the News’

Howard Schneider was the editor of Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, for decades before he retired from journalism, planning to pursue all of those pleasurable endeavors that he’d forsaken to be a news hound. But his hiatus was a short one.

Schneider is now the dean of the brand new Stony Brook University School of Journalism and he has created a new form of study that I believe is the most valuable form of media literacy. It’s called “news literacy.”

Schneider himself coined the name of this new genre, which he described at a conference two weeks ago. It is “the ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports,” he said.

Schneider was a featured speaker at “Rebooting the News: Reconsidering an Agenda for American Civic Education.” The conference on Oct. 23-25 in Philadelphia was sponsored by Temple University’s Media Education Lab. It was billed as “a strategic convening for journalists, teachers, educational administrators, public-policy researchers and engaged citizens.” The question to be answered at the conference was this: “How can we best help young people engage with news media in ways that help them understand and contribute to contemporary society?”

I believe Schneider has found the answer, which he is in the process of perfecting at Stony Brook, he told the conference. I was able to attend through the generous posting of his session on the Internet.

This journalist is passionate about his new vocation. He came to it in a roundabout way while teaching his first course at Stony Brook. There, he said, he discovered that his students, who by the way, were not journalism majors, fell into three groups. A third of them tended to believe everything they saw and read. A third didn’t believe anything, didn’t trust the press, believing it was motivated by profits and greed.

The final third of the class was simply baffled and confused. They would ask if Michael Moore is a journalist; if Bill O’Reilly is a reporter; if they could rely on YouTube for their news, he said.

He immediately began planning a course that would help them sort it all out.
“The mission of training the journalists of the future is crucial and we’ll do it,” he told the group, but, “the mission has to be not only training journalists, but news consumers too. That mission, to me is as important, if not more important, than training journalists.”

News is the currency of citizenship, he said. The ultimate goal, then, is to give students tools and analytical training to tell “what information is reliable enough for you to make a conclusion, to make a judgment…” In other words, can they use the information to make a decision or would that be a mistake? “I cannot imagine any citizen of the Information Age not being equipped with this skill,” he said.

Schneider said his experience gives him the skill to know good journalism, although he can’t pretend to know what will happen to the industry as its new financial model gets ironed out.

“No matter what the business model … we’re going to need an audience, an audience that can distinguish between quality journalism, journalism that really makes a difference, that they can trust, and journalism that’s junk,” he said.

Schneider starts the course by teaching students to recognize what neighborhood they’re in while consuming their media. If they find “verification, independence and accountability” by the author, they are in the journalism neighborhood, he explained.

The course points up both good and bad journalism. Students learn to distinguish news from opinion and solid opinion writing from junk. They learn the opinion neighborhood landmarks, he said.

They also learn the definition of journalistic truth – that truth is provisional, that it changes over time. This means the news consumer can never stop digging for the follow-up story. “You must follow the story over time. You must stay with the story over time,” he said.

Schneider’s course should be required of all students, probably starting in the early elementary grades. Our goal as journalism teachers should be to develop elementary and high school-level courses that do what Schneider has laid out so well on the college level.
It seems media literacy is growing up, splitting into genres. To me, it’s a great development.