Educator Guide and Support

Detailed Lesson Guide: Module 1

Enduring understanding: The ability to filter information is an essential skill for journalists and consumers.

Essential questions: How can consumers effectively categorize and filter news and information? What makes an issue or event newsworthy, and who decides?

Module 1 Lesson 1: Know Your Zone: Sorting Information

Estimated student time on platform: 60 minutes (+ blending)

Learning Objective: I can analyze examples of information and categorize them by determining their primary purpose.
CCSS alignment: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.6
Essential questions:
- Does the purpose of a piece of information affect its credibility? Why or why not?
- What are some of the main reasons that people create and share information?
Lesson host: Tracie Potts, NBC News Channel
Background: As the amount of information in existence grows at an unprecedented rate, filtering information is an increasingly essential news literacy skill. The foundational concepts of Info Zones help guide students to the vital realization that not all information is created equal and that the credibility of different types of information is often correlated with their purpose. By helping students discover the seven major primary purposes of information, you can help activate questioning purpose as a habit of mind.
Of course, most pieces of information have more than one purpose — a television show that is produced to be entertaining can also be informative, for example, or an advertisement produced to sell a product or service can also entertain — but this lesson helps students understand that almost all the information they encounter has one primary purpose that has a significant effect on its level of credibility.

Blending tips and strategies:

Prompts for discussion:
- Which kind of information do you think is easiest to identify? Which is most difficult? Why?
- How many examples of raw information can you think of? (This could be given to small groups and/or timed.)
- Can you determine the main purpose of all pieces of information? Why or why not?
Graphic organizers: NONE

Go deeper: Challenge students to create their own Info Zone compilations, then have them share their collections with their peers. You might even hold a team-based contest to see who can correctly categorize information the fastest, or who can create the most interesting or challenging collection.
Taking informed action: Encourage students to take ownership of their new categorization skills and create their own more comprehensive and detailed system of Info Zones. What is missing from the basic seven zones? What further subzones should be added? How can this new system be effectively visualized and conveyed? What some positive civic outcomes might result from your system being introduced to others?

Module 1 Lesson 2: What Is News?

Estimated student time on platform: 45 minutes (+ blending)

Learning Objective: I can explain what newsworthiness is and name the four major factors that determine it. I have developed my own sense of news judgment by evaluating the newsworthiness of a series of examples.
CCSS alignment: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.8; RH.9-10.8
Essential questions:
- What does it mean for something to be “newsworthy”?
- What makes an issue or event “news,” and who decides?
- What factors should be used to determine which issues and events get covered by journalists?
Lesson host: Paul Saltzman, Chicago Sun-Times
Background: Newsworthiness is a key news literacy concept. It helps students understand that what appears as “the news” on any given day is the result of a series of judgments and conversations in newsrooms across the country and around the world. Helping students understand the major factors that drive news judgment — how important, interesting, unique and timely an event or issue is — is vital to helping them understand and think critically about the news they encounter in their daily lives. Requiring them to make news judgments of their own can help them to appreciate how difficult such decisions can be and to learn how to evaluate and respond to the judgment of professional journalists.
News judgment frequently plays a role in criticism of news media ‒— politicians, activists and ordinary citizens commonly make assertions about where a given story or issue appears in print or on a news organization’s website (or even whether the story or issue is published at all). Thus, the acquisition of “newsworthiness” as a concept and news judgment as a skill allows students to do more than just criticize; it enables them to enter the conversation about so-called agenda-setting and to engage these kinds of criticisms when and where they encounter them. You should make a point of noting to students that while many people make assertions about what news media do or do not cover, it’s always important to verify whether those assertions are true by surveying and reviewing actual coverage.

Blending tips and strategies:

Prompts for discussion:
- At the end of the class, have students share and discuss the news judgments they made during the lesson, then structure an activity in which students attempt to persuade a classmate with a different judgment to change his or her mind. For example, you might pair up students who made different judgments and challenge them to come to a consensus on the stories to cover. Or you might pick one pair of stories that was particularly difficult to choose between and give one or more students two minutes in front of the class to try to convince their classmates why one is more deserving of coverage..
Graphic organizers: NONE

Go deeper:
- Begin exploring some of the possible tensions involved in making news judgments. For example, how can you resolve the fact that what the public is likely to find most interesting often is not the most important story of the day? Should journalists give positive stories more weight in their judgments than negative stories? Are there certain kinds of news stories that should get a boost in news judgment for some reason?
- Ask students to review news coverage from the last several days and find the most newsworthy story from each, then create a gallery walk in which students vote for the most newsworthy example.
- Ask students to write down a subject that they think is non-newsworthy but that they believe news media cover too often, and another subject that they think is newsworthy and that they believe news media ignore or don’t cover enough. Then redistribute their assertions to a classmate and challenge the class to check the assertions they received by analyzing actual coverage. Did the perceptions and assertions of their classmates hold up under scrutiny, or did consulting actual news coverage disprove the assertion?
Taking informed action: Challenge your students to use their new understanding of the four factors that drive news judgment to come up with a newsworthy story idea and then pitch the idea to a local journalist or news organization.

Module 1 Lesson 3: Be the Editor: Deciding the Day’s Top News Stories

Estimated student time on platform: 35 minutes (+ blending)

Learning Objective: I can apply and extend my news judgment skills by comparing the newsworthiness of a group of dissimilar news stories and support and defend my choices.
CCSS alignment: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.7; W.9-10.9
Essential questions:
- How should news organizations decide which news reports to feature as the top stories of the day?
- Besides NLP’s “Big Four” factors of newsworthiness, what else should journalists consider when making news judgments?
Lesson host: None
Background: Because newsworthiness is such a nuanced topic, encompassing many shifting factors and involving subjective judgments by different people in different contexts, it is difficult to give students a comprehensive understanding of it. This is why we created the “Big Four” factors: they are general enough to be reasonably comprehensive, yet simple enough for students (especially those new to the subject) to understand and build on. But there are two more major factors that journalists often use to make news judgments: proximity and audience.
Clearly the proximity of an event can have an effect on its newsworthiness. This is highlighted in this lesson by the presence of two stories about accidents in the 20-story lineup (or “news budget”) that students are asked to narrow to five top stories. One is about a ferry accident in the Mediterranean Sea that has likely resulted in 130 fatalities, and another is about a local warehouse fire that claimed five lives. If audience and proximity were not part of students’ considerations of the importance of these stories, then the report about the ferry accident would certainly be more newsworthy. But since local audiences care more about things that happen close to them, the warehouse story is arguably, for a variety of reasons, bigger news.
But while proximity and audience are certainly factors that journalists consider every day, they do not stand alone as major factors the way that the “Big Four” do. Rather, they tend to act as subfactors that fit under others. In some cases, proximity and audience are part of judging importance, and in others they are part of judging interest. Often they are part of gauging more than one of the major aspects of newsworthiness.
It is up to you whether you want to introduce these two additional factors as concepts that might help students rank stories’ newsworthiness in a more meaningful way.
Whatever you decide to do about proximity and audience, you should note that this lesson offers additional opportunities to explore the tensions and subtleties of news judgment. The ferry and warehouse stories highlight the tension between raw impact (130 lives vs. five lives) and personal impact (distant disaster vs. local disaster). The inclusion of positive stories in this lesson can fuel a discussion about whether journalists should include this as a factor in their judgment of top stories. Should they consciously ensure that the most visible news reports are not all negative, or should they provide the public with the biggest stories regardless of how negative or positive they are?
(This raises a related question about the extent to which journalists can or should concern themselves with the overall impact of a collection of stories. Is it fair to conclude that a selection of news reports sends its own message — in this case, about the negativity or positivity present in the world? Can or should journalists concern themselves with the larger meanings that various consumers might perceive in a selection of stories? Should journalists consciously work to combat damaging or inaccurate stereotypes, or would that make them activists? Should top stories always be a blend of certain types of stories — international, national, local, human interest, etc. — or does this depend on each day’s news?)
Finally, you should note that by requiring students to make actual news judgments of their own, this lesson forces them to exclude several compelling, highly newsworthy stories from their list of top stories. This highlights the importance of having students experience key news literacy concepts the way journalists do — answering the question “how should this be done?” — to help sharpen students’ insights and critiques as consumers.

Blending tips and strategies:

Prompts for discussion:
- Use the Newseum’s daily collection of front pages and have one or more discussions about the news judgment at different news organizations.
- Have students count off, then assign each group a local news outlet and ask them to document the top stories (front page, home page, or the initial stories in a news broadcast) that evening. The following day, have students compare and discuss the similarities and differences.
- Challenge students’ news judgment by asking them questions that deepen and complicate the subject. Should journalists judge each top story candidate individually, or should they consider their overall effect as a group? For example, should journalists ensure a mix of positive and negative stories? Should there only be one story about a given topic on the front page, or should there sometimes be more? How should lead images be selected?
Graphic organizers: NONE

Go deeper:
- Challenge your students to test their assumptions about judgments made by news media by asking them to work individually or in teams to write a hypothesis about the coverage of a particular issue, person, political candidate, event or type of story. For example, students may feel that major news organizations cover celebrities more than they do climate change, or that they cover teens negatively, or that they have failed to cover a particular statement or position by a political candidate.
- Next, have students research and test their hypotheses by doing a detailed search of news coverage. (It will be necessary for you to set parameters to make sure their searches are reasonably comprehensive and to ensure that students are not unknowingly conducting searches that affirm their original assertions.) Once they have tested their hypotheses, have them create something to share with the class such as a slide deck or written report.
- Alternatively, have students or teams trade their hypotheses and then ask them to research and test the validity of other students’ assertions about news judgment. If your students discover something interesting about the coverage (or lack of coverage) of a particular topic, please share it with our team and consider contacting one or more of the news organizations about your findings.
Taking informed action: Challenge your students to evaluate the news judgment of a local news organization and respond accordingly. Consider dividing students into small groups or teams and assign each one a news organization (local television news programs newspapers, local news radio station, etc.) to monitor. Standardizing their documentation of story topics is helpful (for instance, document only the first five stories in a television newscast and the front page stories in print; check websites at the same time each day and take a screenshot of the entire home page). After the week is finished, aggregate the data and produce a report about the week’s coverage. Which stories were covered by everyone? Which were only reported by one? What differences were there in terms of when the story was reported? To wrap up, ask students to make an argument for which local news organizations) had the best news judgment that week, using the aggregated data for support.

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