News Literacy in a Digital Age: Stony Brook University's Innovative Curriculum to Develop the Critical Thinking Skills of Young News Consumers

Instead of making us smarter, digital delivery has overwhelmed many of us. Worse, it has loosened the public’s grip on what is true and what is not.  In order to train the next generations, we need the tools to teach people how to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports and news sources.

In this seminar, Richard Hornik will give an overview of the News Literacy Project Stony Brook has developed to train the next generation of news consumers to think critically about what they read, watch, and hear, using recent examples from the media to highlight the need for new media literacies in today’s digital age.  Tapping into the passion journalists feel for their craft, the project is bringing active and retired journalists into schools to encourage students to seek verified information on any medium or platform. This seminar will introduce participants to the program and to some of these training tools.  

One aim of the presentation is to stimulate discussion as to how such a program might be adapted beyond the American context within which it was developed.

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Richard Hornik has more than two decades of worldwide service with Time magazine and other Time Inc. publications, including his role as business editor of its European edition, and bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong. He is currently Director of Southeast Asia Programs for the Independent Journalism Foundation, focusing on training journalists in Vietnam and Cambodia, and is a lecturer at Stony Brook University.