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When I was a Creative Communications student at Red River Polytech, our journalism class was subjected to a daily news quiz. Actually, it could have been weekly, but it sure felt like it was daily.
I recall some of the questions on it would be weirdly specific — “who wrote the movie review on C3” kind of thing — but they were mostly designed to see if you were paying attention to the news. After all, we’d one day be the ones reporting the news.
I am going to level with you. I failed the news quiz a lot. I was also deeply resentful of it. This is a famously rigorous program that starts at 8 a.m., what do you mean we also have to read the whole newspaper every morning?
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(Real quick: Do you ever have that thing where you look back on a job, a university course, whatever, and think, “Wow, I would be so much better at that if I wasn’t 19?”)
Anyway, even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, the news quiz did create a habit of news consumption.
Pre-college, I don’t recall interacting with the newspaper much. I was not born with newspaper ink in my veins, as it were.
Many of my colleagues grew up reading the newspaper (or, at least, the comics), but I was a staunch book, magazine and, eventually, alt-weekly girlie.
All the journalism I consumed came from Rolling Stone and Spin and Seventeen and Elle — print tomes that produced the same kind of journalism I have produced throughout my own career, and largely taught me how to write in the conversational, irreverent voice you are hopefully enjoying right now!
The point is: journalism still had a strong presence in my life. But it was mostly self-directed.
Prior to my post-secondary years, I don’t recall a class teaching me how to be critical of what I was reading or how advertising shapes our worldview or the importance of a free press to democracy or any other tenet of media literacy outside of maybe an odd English unit. I didn’t get involved in the student press until college; while my high school had a radio station, we didn’t have a newspaper.
And, as a Relative Old, I didn’t yet have to deal with the social media spread of disinformation or podcasts or YouTubers or doomscrolling or AI or an ever-compressed and ever-fragmented news cycle.
All of this is top of mind as we’re embarking on a very exciting Media Literacy project here at the Free Press, in partnership with the province and WSD, which my colleagues Maggie Macintosh and Melissa Martin wrote about at length in last Saturday’s paper. (Give Maggie a follow @maggiemckmac on TikTok or @medialitmags on Instagram.)
The first phase of the Media Literacy Resource has already launched, and the new website — winnipegfreepress.com/education — is available to educators across Manitoba and beyond. Among the resources included is a student journalism kit that gives students access to templates and other resources to start their own newspaper.
Not to be all “now more than ever” but now more than ever, a resource like this is so vitally important. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are dealing with an unprecedented media landscape; they must process and filter through a constant stream — make that firehose — of information all day long. Media literacy isn’t new, but it has changed.
I’m optimistic about this project for so many reasons, not the least of which is the belief it will impart upon younger generations the importance of a free press — and, hopefully, the importance of the Free Press.
P.S. Some housekeeping: I am headed out of the country, but because of the way my 10-day holiday falls, there will be no new NEXT until Nov. 26! I know! We’ll catch up then.
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