News Literacy
News Literacy is all about consuming credible information and using reliable sources in your work. Below are some examples of how I've used news literacy skills while working on my three various publications.
The Social Collateral
The Social Collateral is a really interesting story for this because it speaks directly about media manipulation and how inaccurate it can really be. We really wanted to make sure we had very good sourcing for this story so we spoke with our CPTV and Radio sponsor since he had experience with posting on the internet and how the algorithms work as well as our local Director of Communications who had worked with similar things in the past. To be sure we were on the right track, we also did some research and found articles confirming what we were told. To round out the story we did some interviewing of students to see how they felt about social media. The student polling and interviewing was crucial because if students didn't feel the same way our primary sources did about social media, then we didn't really have a relevant story at all. In the end, I think all the hard work paid off and we ended up with a really unique news story.
Ancient Shipping Wars: Patrochilles vs. Brichilles
This Ancient Shipping Wars story was part of my first issue of Tempus Canis I created my junior year when I was our local Latin club editor. When Jackie approached me with this story, I loved the idea, but we both knew it would take some work. When writing it, we went back and forth making sure we had accurate sourcing and everything was reliable. Thankfully, Jackie had previously taken the Beginning Journalism class with me and knew a thing or two herself about getting reliable sources. She spent a lot of time working on it and, with some tweaking from me, it ended up being this really fascinating story I still like to read through today.
Building from Scratch
Building from Scratch is a really good example of things almost going wrong because we did not fact check appropriately. I was not originally assigned to this story, but I did work on some of the design. The side bar we originally had which gave a short description of all the new clubs we have this year was quite large, and I wasn't sure that all of them were actually new clubs or not. At Crown Point High School, we do have quite the amount of clubs, but most of them have been around for a while. When I did more research into it, I found that at least three of the original clubs we had listed were in fact not new clubs. Thankfully it was caught before we published, but it really goes to show that you can never do too much fact checking when creating a story and infographics.
