NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 8
History of NLP
On Feb. 2, 2008, soon after receiving that founding
grant, Miller began a leave of absence from the Los
Angeles Times to focus on developing his idea (and
ended up resigning a month later). He wanted to
create a program that would give students in middle
school and high school the tools to separate fact
from fiction in everything they read, watch or hear,
enabling them to appreciate the value of quality news
coverage and encouraging them to consume and
create credible information across all types of media.
Miller’s realization from 2006 — that journalists could
have an impact in the classroom — was a central part
of the mission, and from the start, journalists joined
educators in teaching students how to know what to
believe.
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In an effort to reach even more students (and
addressing teachers’ wishes for more educational
technology in the classroom), NLP developed a
digital unit in 2012. It retained the journalists’ voices
through narrated video lessons, interactive computerbased training sessions and a live videoconference.
That same year NLP began working with Evaluation
Services, an outside consultant, to conduct formal
assessments of its programs — a collaboration that
continues to this day.
On Feb. 2, 2009 — exactly one year after Miller’s
leave of absence began — NLP kicked off its initial
pilot with an event featuring Soledad O’Brien, a
CNN correspondent and NLP board member, at
Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, a middle
school in Brooklyn, New York. That afternoon, David
Gonzalez, a reporter and columnist at The New York
Times, delivered NLP’s first classroom lesson. Just
over three weeks later, NLP began its classroom
program in five Advanced Placement government
classes at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda,
featuring journalists from Time, ABC News, Politico,
The New York Times and USA Today, among others.
The success of those initial pilots led NLP to expand
the classroom program to Chicago, Illinois, in the fall
of 2009, followed by Washington, D.C., in the spring
of 2011. In each city, NLP partnered primarily with
underresourced schools where a majority of the
students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch
programs. At the same time, NLP was making its
name known to a wider audience through a series of
public events in the Washington area, featuring such
well-known journalists as Gwen Ifill of Washington
Week and PBS NewsHour, David Brooks and Thomas
Friedman of The New York Times, Chuck Todd and
Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, Ruth Marcus and
E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, and Al Hunt of
Bloomberg News.
Top: Miller and Soledad O’Brien (right) attend the kickoff event
for NLP’s classroom program at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter
School in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. Bottom: Gwen Ifill (left)
moderates a student panel on the importance of news literacy at
the Council on Foundations’ annual conference in Washington,
D.C., in 2014.
By the 2013-14 school year, NLP’s classroom, afterschool and digital programs had mobilized journalists
to work with more than 100 English, government,
history and journalism teachers in 82 schools to
reach more than 6,800 students in Chicago, New
York City and the Washington, D.C., area (including
suburbs in Maryland and Virginia). But it had become