Nonprofit News Literacy Project Welcomes Former Educator as CEO, With Plans to Expand
Fourteen years after its founding and with a misinformation panorama many magnitudes extra dire than anybody might’ve predicted, the News Literacy Project will herald in a brand new CEO this summer time, marking a transition in management however not a change in route for the education-focused nonprofit.
On June 30, founder and CEO Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will step down, permitting Charles Salter to step into the highest spot.
Salter, who presently serves as NLP’s president and chief working officer, will convey his background in schooling—as a instructor, a principal, a superintendent, and a nonprofit chief—to the group’s rising employees.
In 2008, when Miller began the News Literacy Project following a go to to his daughter’s sixth grade class, he thought information literacy could be an necessary talent for college students and educators within the age of burgeoning social media and smartphones. Indeed, it might prove to be much more vital than he anticipated.
Misinformation “has actually become one of the greatest—if not the greatest—challenges of our time,” says Miller in an interview with EdSurge reflecting on the group’s historical past and trajectory. “It underscores everything else: immigration, climate change, public health. If we can’t agree on what a fact is—if the marketplace of ideas breaks down—then how are we ever going to achieve consensus to tackle the other great challenges of our time? How are we ever going to bridge the digital divide—the digital abyss—if we have different realities of a pandemic, of the outcome of an election, of a war in Ukraine with Russia?”
Miller added that, 14 years in the past, if somebody had instructed him that tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans would later consider and promote “absolutely discredited conspiratorial thinking”—and could be performing on it in ways in which influenced public well being selections and the well being of our democracy—he wouldn’t have believed it.
“In many ways, I feel like we went from being a voice in the wilderness to an answer to a prayer, particularly after the 2016 election,” he provides.
From its inception, NLP has sought to be strictly nonpartisan, aiming to train folks how to take into consideration the information and data they devour, not what to give it some thought, Salter explains. The group has completed that by a weekly e mail publication known as the Sift, a web based studying platform known as Checkology, and different sources and applications which have collectively reached an estimated 2 million college students within the final yr and greater than 50,000 educators in all 50 states and 120 international locations.
Plenty of main occasions in recent times, together with the 2016 presidential election within the U.S., have underscored the necessity for higher information literacy—the COVID-19 pandemic and the riots on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, chief amongst them. During that point, the News Literacy Project has gone from a distinct segment nonprofit to a pacesetter in a nationwide effort to create a extra discerning public, beginning with its younger folks and educators.
Now, as disinformation and misinformation proceed to distort info and manipulate fact—the newest instance being as large-scale as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—NLP has gathered some momentum.
In its first 14 years, the group raised greater than $35 million, from a mixture of foundations, companies, and main and small donors. It has additionally grown to make use of 30 employees. In its subsequent 4 years, NLP goals to elevate $36 million and double in measurement to 60 employees. This summer time alone, NLP hopes to rent for and fill 15 new positions.
Part of that enlargement, which shall be led by Salter, contains an effort to attain not solely academics and learners however most people as effectively.
“We’re doing that through exponential growth of the organization and not stealing anything from education,” Salter explains. “We’re simply building a new half.”
As NLP evolves, it should proceed its work in schooling and construct out extra programming on that aspect. One effort is to assist extra states undertake media literacy necessities, as Texas and Illinois have completed. Others embrace plans to develop a graduate-level course that trains educators to train information literacy and a nationwide information literacy convention for educators and college students.
“We’re going to take our practice to the next level with things we haven’t done—community building, training, certification,” Salter says.
On most people aspect, the group plans to create a platform that anybody can go to to test info on main points and present occasions and to be taught extra about how to consider information and discern credible from unimaginable data.
“Our goal now is to turn the mission into a national movement,” Miller says. “We want to change the way people share and consume information so there’s a much greater sense of personal responsibility. We want to change the culture, the way we’ve seen with smoking and drunk driving and littering. That is a key fact and key driver in the new plan for our organization.”
As Salter takes the helm this summer time, Miller will keep on with the title of founder and serve full time for an extra yr, primarily working to fundraise for NLP and advise Salter. He will stay on the board indefinitely, he says.
Salter, for his half, says that though he’ll usher in a interval of dramatic progress and enlargement for NLP, the employees and normal public can anticipate stability and continuity beneath his management.
“My style of management and strategic planning and what I prioritize has slowly become the organization’s approach. I don’t think folks will see much of a difference,” he says. “There’s nothing I’m sitting on that’s going to radically change, no drastic culture shift or even a shift in our priorities, because those have melded together in the last four years.”
