An Introduction to News Media Literacy Watch Party

Join us for a watch party with snacks and refreshments as Dr. Michael Spikes of Northwestern University talks to us about how to confidently utilize and assess online news sources. We will be viewing a livestream of Dr. Spikes' presentation.

Our media ecosystem today is increasingly messy, with a mix of professionally produced and user-generated content that often blurs together on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has added yet another layer of complexity, making it even easier for misleading or fabricated material to appear credible. In this session, Dr. Michael A. Spikes, of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, explores how this blending of sources—and now AI-generated material—creates a “blurring of the lines” between types of content, making it harder to know what to trust. Patrons leave the workshop with practical skills for assessing the credibility of information from different outlets and strategies for building a set of reliable sources you can return to regularly.

About the Speaker: Michael Spikes, Ph.D., has been teaching, writing about, and developing curriculum on the subject of News Media Literacy and its production for more than 15 years. Currently, he is a Professor of Practice and the Program Director of Teach for Chicago Journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern, Michael was a project manager for the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University. 

This program is presented in a hybrid format- if you would like to attend on Zoom, please register through the Schaumburg Township District Library website. (https://www.schaumburglibrary.org/events?id=15056902#)