THE YOUNG AND THE NEWS

Jodie Jackson has an audacious goal: to completely change children’s relationships with the news. Having spent more than a decade researching and exploring how the news impacts us, in 2019 she published You Are What You Read: why changing your media diet can change the world, followed up with a 2020 children’s book Little Ruffle and The World Beyond. In 2022, she presented Beyond fake news: how to heal a broken worldview at the TEDxLondon stage, which has been viewed more than 10,000 times. And since 2021, she’s been building the News Literacy Lab, which offers news literacy programmes to “empower young people by equipping them with essential skills to navigate the news in today’s world”. It’s a timely skill set. Research published by the University of Oxford in 2022 found that only around a third of 18- to 24-year-olds trust most news (compared with more than half of those aged 55 and above), and that around four in 10 of those under 35 often or sometimes avoid the news. A shocking 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labelled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. Researchers from the University of Liverpool found that participation in the News Literacy Lab left students “feeling more equipped to evaluate the credibility of news sources”, and to be “aware of their own biases and those of media organisations”. Importantly, it also helped students feel more hopeful about the world and their role within it, with an emphasis on ‘solutions-focused journalism’, which aims to present a more complete picture by highlighting responses and potential solutions to issues. We spoke to Jodie to understand what she thinks young people need to know about navigating the news, how news is made and how to help young people construct a healthy news diet. Like many people, you’ve had a complex relationship with the news. How did that lead you to create the News Literacy Lab? When I was around 21 or 22, I just couldn't stand the news anymore. It made me feel so depressed about the world and so hopeless about the future, because of seeing terrible, terrible things happening daily. I decided to switch off from it but found that was nearly impossible because the news is everywhere. It will find you, whether it's through a radio programme, a conversation with a friend, or just standing in a queue at the shops where you can see the front pages. It's everywhere. I felt like turning off didn't really fix the problem I was trying to solve. It made me feel slightly less bad slightly less often, but it didn't make me feel significantly better. So I started a (now defunct) website called What A Good Week, which was an aggregator platform of solutions-focused news. And I had such a profound shift in myself from changing my media diet that I wanted to understand it more rigorously, so I went back to university and did a master's in positive psychology, because I wanted to understand concepts like hope, optimism, resilience, post-traumatic growth. I wanted to understand what the conditions for them are, and what the impact of them is. There was very little research at the time around solutions-focused content, so that's what I created my thesis on. But then when Covid hit, I realised that even with everything that I had learned, I couldn't be an effective mediator between my three children and their information spaces. So I wrote a children's book that addressed some of this. I went on to create some resources for teachers for seven- to 11-year-olds, and at that point, I realised I was teaching young people how to have a healthy relationship with news. I was teaching them to create a balanced understanding of the world and empower them to be able to act within it. How does your work differ from other news literacy programmes? News literacy is becoming more valued as a practice, but a lot of it can be quite one-dimensional and quite impractical. A lot of news literacy programmes are very much about fake news, and overly burdening consumers with the responsibility of fact-checking and verifying. This can be unhelpful, especially because so many people are disengaging from the news. I've learned over the last five years that fake news is not the only contributor to a misinformed worldview. Our curriculum does have a fake news element, but we also look at the negativity bias, solutions journalism, and we look at human psychology. This is to understand how our brains process information and what biases are built into our news.