As if the conference wasn't enough to get the media literacy community dancing in the streets, I am beyond thrilled to announce the
2019 U.S. Media Literacy Week!
The 5th Annual U.S. Media Literacy Week will take place October 21 - 25, 2019. We have moved up the week to October to better align with global efforts.
Global Media and Information Literacy Week will be held October 24 -31 annually. You will hear more about our MLW efforts at the conference in June including our growing collaboration with Australia and Canada.
(On a related note, check out
this announcement
about youth scholarships
for Global MIL Week 2019 Feature Conference and Youth Agenda Forum to be held from September 24-26, in Gothenburg, Sweden.)
In the meantime, if you are interested in being part of the leadership team for MLW 2019, please consider the position of regional chair. Regional chairs work as liaisons with local partners and support the regional efforts for the national initiative. If you are interested or want more information, please contact us at
[email protected].
It wouldn't be one of my newsletters if I didn't take a moment to share something that has been on my mind lately. I've been thinking a lot about the notion of
good news.
I know I've told you before that I read "10 Things you need to know today" from The Week. To be honest, it really should be called "10 Really Depressing, Disturbing and Alarming Things that will make you anxious today." The Week now produces "The Good News Newsletter" which outlines, well, good news stories about things like human kindness, medical advancements and heroic actions. CNN has recently decided to join in on the good news bandwagon with their own weekly newsletter called "The Good Stuff." The Good Stuff newsletter looks a bit different from the CNN homepage. Here's a couple of recent uplifting
headlines. Ugh.
The "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality has been around a long time, but I find these attempts to balance it somewhat disingenuous. If actual news was more balanced, we wouldn't need these attempts at "the world is not so bad" messaging. These news outlets push the negative narrative and then counteract the same narrative with other content that is supposed to make us feel better about all the negative content they pushed towards us from the start. Hmmmm...I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.
I'd much prefer a universe where news is balanced, where a huge medical advancement or an extraordinary story of human determination is deemed important enough to be regular content on a website or in a daily newsletter. And where sad, sensationalist stories are relugated to tabloid magazines in grocery store aisles where they should be.
Do you agree? Am I missing something? Email me and share your thoughts. Or better yet, come to Washington, D.C. at the end of June and tell me in person.
A
ll the best,
