news literacy
Above is my reporter’s notebook, which I use for everything from taking notes during interviews to jotting down the day’s top news stories. Photo by Eric Fang
Since joining journalism my freshman year, I have listened to National Public Radio’s five-minute newscast every day on the way to school and every day on the drive back. It is my way of keeping up with the news on-the-go, and it has the added benefit of giving me a slight edge on our weekly current events quizzes.
Since then, in addition to NPR, I have branched out to a variety of news outlets and media forms. In addition to keeping me informed, regular news consumption has helped me learn to discern credible sources from not-so-credible ones and provided models for reporting with professionalism.
KEEPING CURRENT
As a news staff, we keep up-to-date on current events with news journals, news tag and current events quizzes.
At the beginning of each journalism class, every student presents their “news journal” on a recent news article. What goes into a news journal? Two paragraphs. One with the who, what, when, where, why and how of the article and another with why we chose this particular article. News journals serve as a bellwether for what our community cares about and accustoms us to constantly checking the news.
Another way we keep up with the news is through a fun activity called “News Tag,” which trains our ability to take quick notes and ask follow-up questions. The class listens to the hourly NPR five-minute newscast and takes frantic yet organized notes in their reporters’ notebook. At the end of the newscast, someone volunteers to start by asking a question based on anything mentioned in the newscast. Whoever answers correctly gets to ask the next question. We do this until ten questions are successfully asked and answered.
Our last way of keeping up with the news is my favorite, a current events quiz. Before class, our adviser compiles a list of questions about the week’s news and tests us on them in class. The prize for whoever gets the most right ranges from a sticker to a Starbucks gift card.
LOCALIZING STORIES
We serve the school community by centering them in our coverage and localizing our stories. In our pitching, writing and editing processes, we encourage our staff to think of local angles and elevate community voices. As global editor, I worked with reporters on localizing international issues like indigenous rights movements and overseas wars. As news editor, I found ways to localize our political coverage by getting the perspectives of those in our community, especially youth, and drilling down into how this politics would specifically affect us in the Bay Area.
For example, when President Donald Trump was impeached, I localized the historic U.S. House vote by speaking with students who actively followed the impeachment inquiry, as well as local organizations that had a stake in the proceedings. I did my best to avoid bias by including a diversity of political opinions from students and people like the Santa Clara County Republican chairman Shane Connolly, U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R.-Pa.), a leader of the Silicon Valley Young Democrats, a local geopolitical forecaster and a leader of Indivisible San Jose. I further localized the article by highlighting local events around impeachment, like protests held in the Bay Area and watch parties hosted by a Harker activism club. Finally, I tried to make the impeachment proceedings more accessible to high school students by breaking down the latest developments in the impeachment process at the end of the article.
Read the article localizing President Trump’s impeachment here.
For more stories localizing issues, visit Writing.
CHECKING THE FACTS
In journalism we are committed to original reporting. To that end, we go directly to the source of information, whether that be a press conference, firsthand report or official media release. We use these reliable sources rather than reporting secondhand information from other news sources because we know even well-known papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post can make their own mistakes.
For example, in an article about the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak, I used statements directly from the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. State Department to avoid reporting uncorroborated information. Similarly, for an interactive graphic I made on the subject, I used data from the CDC, the Wuhan Health Commission, the National Health Commission of China and the World Health Organization.
CHECKING BIAS
Throughout my time as an editor, I have constantly had to cover difficult topics with multiple sides to the story. When writing these articles, I try my best to check my bias and see things with an objective eye. Two of the in-depth articles I wrote this school year exemplified my efforts at even-handed reporting.
The first is an article on Juristac, a stretch of land near Gilroy that the Amah Mutsun, a Native American tribe, holds sacred. When shareholders of the land proposed to build a large mining quarry there, the Amah Mutsun people protested to protect this land and preserve their culture. I covered these protests and talked to tribe members and their supporters. When they shared with me their heartfelt stories and feelings of injustice, I felt myself drawn to their cause.
However, I checked my bias. I realized that I was missing the perspectives of the land’s owners, who proposed the quarry, and the city planners who would be voting on the project. I called and interviewed the CEO of Freeman Associates, the company the shareholders hired to represent them, as well as the director of planning and development for Santa Clara County.
Above are photos I took at the Juristac protest and the county librarians’ protest. Hover over the images for their captions.
Through these additional perspectives, I found out that the purpose of the quarry is to produce concrete to support Santa Clara County’s burgeoning construction and development. The landowners argued that a local quarry would actually benefit the environment by reducing the amount of fossil fuel used to transport concrete from places like Canada.
Further, the director of planning and development was able to discuss the environmental impact review that the county was conducting in order to decide whether to proceed with the quarry. Through this interview, I learned that this particular environmental impact review would be the first to consider cultural impact as well as environmental impact, and that there were many ambiguities involved in how the county defined cultural impact. The planning director was also able to provide greater context to the county’s relationship with its Native American residents, including the struggle to balance developers’ interests with those of indigenous groups in land disputes going back decades.
Through checking my bias, I was able to incorporate and contextualize multiple sides to a complicated, controversial issue.
I similarly checked my bias when I covered strikes organized by county employees last fall. In addition to interviewing striking librarians, union leaders and other county workers, I also spoke to a county supervisor attempting to negotiate agreements with the unions. The county supervisor’s interview added a valuable perspective, revealing that the county’s recent decline in economic growth limited its ability to promise higher wages and better benefits to its workers.
As an editor, I also help other reporters avoid bias. For more on how I check for bias in the articles I edit, visit Editing.
CHECKING THE STATS
Contrary to what we are taught in math class, numbers can lie. Through researching for a data-heavy longform article on the Bay Area housing crisis over the course of several months, I learned how presenting different statistics on the same phenomenon can greatly influence reader perceptions. To that end, I tried to use the most objective data sources by working with the latest raw numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, rather than re-reporting other new outlets’ number crunching. Besides, since several of the latest reports were just released in January, many news outlets had not even gone through the new numbers yet.
I devoted a lot of thought to the most neutral and informative ways to present this data. For example, after conducting extensive research on the real estate and housing market, I learned that median monthly rent is a more representative statistic of the housing market than average rent, as a select few extremely expensive homes tend to skew average rent amounts toward the higher end.
I also included some amount of interpretation and analysis to provide context and help our readers make sense of the numbers. For example, in the following graf, I compared the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area to the average local salaries for various occupations:
The median home value in Santa Clara County is currently priced at $1,170,576. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area is $1,975 a month, or $23,700 a year, which is 16 percent of an average Bay Area software engineer’s annual income, 29 percent of an experienced Bay Area public school teacher’s income and 81 percent of a full-time Bay Area Starbucks barista’s income.
See the full sourcing list for the longform article on housing here.
Below are some of the sources I used for reliable data on the housing crisis. These include the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the Employment Development Department of the State of California, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census.