It’s National News Literacy Week, but what that term means can vary depending on whom you’re talking to. It’s a term that Patrick Johnson spends a lot of time thinking about.
Johnson is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Marquette University, who teaches students how to engage with news. He joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to talk about the importance of news literacy and how to help people better understand the work that journalists do.
One commonly used definition of news literacy is “to think and act like a journalist” as you access, analyze and think about news and information. For a more comprehensive approach, however, Johnson says it’s helpful to think about news literacy in terms of five different domains: context, creation, content, circulation and consumption.
The five domains of news literacy
The first domain of news literacy is about taking into account the social, historical, economic and political context of the news.
“For example, as I’m sitting in the studio with you, it’s not just producing a radio show — it’s not just you interviewing me,” Johnson says. “It’s in the confines of who is funding this radio show, the history of this radio show, down to the history of the name of the radio show.”
Creation considers the role of journalists and journalistic practices in producing the news content, while the domain of content deals with a news story’s qualitative characteristics — that is, how information is conveyed and put together in a given story.
Circulation and consumption are two final components of news literacy that are often overlooked, Johnson says. Circulation considers the means through which news gets to consumers — across airwaves, across digital channels and between social media users.
Subscriptions to publications play a major role in the process of news circulation, along with social media algorithms and echo chambers.
Johnson says it’s important to ask: “How does that information get curated, and how does that curation get to you, Joy, and how does it look different than me, Patrick?”
Finally, consumption deals with the varied social and cognitive effects that the news has on us — its impact on our daily lives and on how we think about the world. Johnson rejects the “hypodermic needle” theory of media — the notion that mass media directly “inject” messages into merely passive audiences. But he also says that taking into account the biases and perspectives of individual journalists, news organizations and media consumers is a crucial component of news literacy.
Improving news literacy
Rather than treating poor media literacy as a “scapegoat,” Johnson says it’s important to recognize the unprecedented scale, complexity and pace of today’s news media ecosystems. He highlights that fact-based reporting takes time, and many news organizations are struggling to keep up with shrinking news cycles, audience demand for immediacy and the spread of misinformation.
“We saw this in the ’80s when CNN became the 24-hour news cycle,” he says. “We’re no longer in the 24-hour news cycle; we’re in the 24-second news cycle.”
To help improve media literacy and civic engagement, Johnson thinks it’s important to equip people with media literacy skills at all age levels — from students to seniors. He also says it’s crucial to address various communities’ specific information needs at the local level, and he highlights the role that news organizations can play.
“I think we as journalists need to be changing the way our models are understood so that everyday people also understand what we’re doing,” he says. “So, when we don’t necessarily tweet out something 20 seconds after it happens — just like [audiences] maybe want it to — there’s a reason.”
