Journalists are being asked to explain their work more than ever, often in moments when trust is already strained. Questions about sourcing, framing, and editorial judgment now travel far beyond the newsroom. Recently, I wrote an article about how journalists define news literacy. What emerges in this piece looks at what happens when journalists are asked to make their thinking visible, and why the language they reach for matters.
Why it matters
News literacy is often framed as something audiences lack
Journalists increasingly use it to explain how journalism works
These two uses are rarely examined together
The core insight
When journalists talk about news literacy, they are often talking about themselves.
In my research, I asked journalists a simple question: What do you think news literacy is? What emerged was not a checklist for audiences, but a window into how journalists explain their own work, authority, and judgment under pressure.
What the research shows
Across 204 responses, journalists described news literacy as:
A way to explain verification, sourcing, and transparency
A way to distinguish journalism from opinion, advertising, or influence
A language for defending standards in an unstable information environment
A way to narrate how journalistic decisions are made
In practice, news literacy functioned less as an audience skill and more as professional self-explanation.
The shift worth noticing
What is easy to miss is that these definitions were not primarily intended to fix public misunderstanding.
They were about making journalistic thinking visible.
News literacy became a way for journalists to draw boundaries, stabilize meaning, and articulate why process matters when trust is no longer assumed.
What this changes about how journalism explains itself
Seen this way, news literacy:
Is not only about teaching people how to consume news
Is also about explaining how journalism works
Functions as a shared vocabulary for public explanation
Becomes most visible during moments of friction, correction, or critique
This helps explain why news literacy language shows up so often in editor’s notes, explainers, and public defenses of journalistic decisions.
How journalists already use this in their work
This research does not point to a new task journalists need to take on. It helps name work that is already happening, often under pressure and without much shared language.
Journalists draw on news literacy thinking when they:
Write editor’s notes explaining sourcing, framing, or editorial judgment
Respond to reader questions about why a story ran or how it was reported
Explain standards around anonymity, verification, or corrections
Talk internally about what distinguishes journalism from commentary or content
In these moments, journalists are not teaching audiences how to consume news. They are explaining how journalistic decisions are made.
Seen this way, news literacy functions less as a lesson and more as a vocabulary. It gives journalists language to make their thinking visible, especially when trust is questioned, and authority alone is not enough.
That is not extra work. It is increasingly part of the work.
What this research makes easier to see
When journalists describe news literacy in their own words, a few practical implications emerge.
First, explanations work better when they center on the process rather than the outcomes. Journalists consistently framed news literacy around decision-making: sourcing choices, verification steps, and editorial constraints mattered more than finished stories. That suggests that transparency is most effective when it shows how journalism happens, not just what journalism produces.
Second, deficit language tends to backfire. When news literacy is framed primarily as something audiences lack, it positions explanation as a form of correction. The research suggests a different starting point: audiences are already reasoning through credibility. What they often lack is visibility into journalistic judgment.
Third, news literacy language is most useful at moments of friction. Journalists turned to it when responding to criticism, explaining corrections, or justifying editorial calls. In practice, this means that literacy is less about proactive education campaigns and more about having a shared language ready when questions arise.
None of this requires journalists to add new work to already-full plates. It reframes existing practices; editor’s notes, explainers, corrections, and conversations with readers become sites where journalistic thinking can be made legible.
The research does not offer a checklist. It provides a more precise map of where explanation already happens, and where it tends to matter most.
Bottom line
If journalism is being asked to explain itself more than ever, then news literacy is less about correcting audiences and more about making journalistic thinking visible.
That shift does not solve journalism’s challenges, but it gives more precise language for naming what is already happening.
To access this article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1461670X.2025.2600428
— PRJ
Thinking, Elsewhere
The New York Times recently hosted a summit on the state of trust in media, which offered a glimpse into how seven media producers think about their work, the audiences’ interpretation (or lack thereof) of it, and how we move forward in a fractured system.
Speaking of the change in journalism’s approach to its thinking about its systems, while not recent, Kara Swisher brought three industry disrupters on to her show back in July to talk about how they think about their work, the ways journalism needs to change and keep up, and how brand is a skill journalists need to consider moving forward.
As Election 2026 approaches, this Cortico-NPR collaboration is worth revisiting not for what it produced, but for how it treated listening as a core journalistic method rather than a post-publication add-on.