It is a necessary component for literacy in contemporary society.”[2] In 2006, Miller was invited to tell 175 sixth-grade students at his daughter's middle school in Bethesda, Maryland, what he did as a journalist and why it was important.
When the students responded with 175 handwritten thank-you notes, he began to think about the impact that many journalists could have if they shared their expertise and experience in classrooms across the country.
It teaches kids to categorize information, make and critique news judgments, detect and dissect viral rumors, interpret and apply the First Amendment, and recognize confirmation bias.
Among the current board members are Tucker Eskew, a political and communications strategist who was deputy assistant to the President for media affairs and global communications under President George W. Bush; philanthropist Eva Haller; Abby Phillip, the anchor of CNN's NewsNight with Abby Phillip; and Liz Ramos, a U.S. history and government teacher at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California.
Introduced in 2016, the Checkology virtual classroom[5] is a browser-based platform with interactive lessons, hosted by journalists and subject matter experts, that examine topics such as "Introduction to Algorithms," "Misinformation," "Conspiratorial Thinking," "Understanding Bias," and "The First Amendment."
NLP's RumorGuard website identifies and debunks examples of viral misinformation; in 2023 the American Association of School Librarians included the platform in its list of "best digital tools for teaching and learning.
Guests have included Maria Ressa, chief executive officer of the digital news site Rappler and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; tech journalist Kara Swisher, a co-founder of Recode and a former contributor to The New York Times' Opinion section; Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general; Michael Luo, the editor of The New Yorker's website; and Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.