The best preparation I received for teaching digital literacy to students was working in journalism. Before becoming a teacher, I had a previous life/career as a writer, editor, and fact-checker for a couple of news outlets. Journalism taught me how to examine bias, evaluate sources, and most importantly, to question everything (especially authority). In this post I’ll using digital literacy and media literacy interchangeably because in 2024 they’re almost nearly the same thing.

A younger Emily flexing her journalism muscles for the University of Saskatchewan student newspaper.

Just because journalist taught me to have good digital literacy skills does not mean that all journalists have good media literacy skills. There are some journalists who are bad at their jobs. Despite this, I do think educators could learn a lot from journalism about the foundations of media literacy. I also think this type of collaboration could help inspire students to pursue journlism or media work themselves.

I’m glad to see some educational resources about media literacy have been developed in collaboration with journalists and media organizations like the Media Literacy Booster Pack from the Newseum, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post Truth’ World from the New York Times, and 10 Types of Misleading News from PBS. Someday I would love to combine my two professional fields and help to develop my own resource for schools about media literacy.