News literacy is an emerging field within the disciplines of media literacy, journalism education, information technology, and other related areas, although there is no unified definition or consensus among researchers as to what exactly the news literacy curriculum should entail. Its core mission is broadly recognized as “citizen empowerment” in that the critical-thinking skills necessary to the evaluation of news reports and the ability to identify fact-based, quality information encourage active participation and engagement among well-informed citizens. One dominant instructional paradigm, which some researchers refer to as the “journalism school approach,” emerged in the mid-2000s and distinguished “news literacy” from its longer-recognized counterpart, media literacy. Lessons in news literacy classrooms focus exclusively on the deconstruction of news content. While news literacy often shares many of its analytical goals and theoretical frameworks with media literacy education, it also contains specialized pedagogical methods specific to the process of news production, which are not applicable to other types of media content.
Despite some heated discussions among scholars, particularly in the United States, with different standpoints on whether this pedagogy is more or less effective than the approaches taken by media literacy educators, the difference between the two and other related fields, such as digital literacy and web literacy, is often ambiguous because in practice, neither discipline is particularly standardized and each instructor’s understanding of the field, as well as their academic training, has a significant impact on students’ learning experiences. Globally, the debate over the—often subtle—nuances that differentiate these various approaches have even less significance, as educators around the world translate and adapt news literacy concepts to fit the unique circumstances and environments found in their own country’s news media, political, and technological environments.
Perhaps the most pressing issue in the current state of news literacy is a lack of a cohesive body of peer-reviewed research, or in particular, a research design that appropriately measures the efficacy of educational models. News literacy studies grounded in social science methods are limited. Scholarship on critical news instruction and skill development, which has been traditionally conducted under the umbrella of media literacy, is mostly comprised of descriptive accounts of educational interventions or self-reported surveys on media attitudes, content consumption behaviors, or analytical skills. In the United States, a body of quantitative work based on an assessment instrument called a “news media literacy scale” has influenced how researchers can contextualize and measure news literacy, and some qualitative analyses shed light on specific pedagogical models. Interest in educational intervention and related research has increased rather dramatically since 2016 as global concerns over “post-truth” media consumption and the “fake news” phenomena have become part of academic discourse in different disciplines. Collaborative works among scholars and practitioners in the areas that could potentially inform the design of effective news literacy curriculum development, such as cognitive science, social psychology, and social media data analysis, have started to emerge as well.
The five resources of critical digital literacy: a framework for curriculum integration