ABOUT COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: Community Connections is a lesson collection designed for adult learners and community colleges, with the goal of inspiring student civic action. This might be respectful debate or conversation about a local issue, planning a community event, or a creative project that helps connect local, national and global issues.
To use this lesson: First, watch the video and answer the questions below as a warm up. Next, choose one or more of the activities under "Take Action" that best fits your classroom. Or, use the segment above to inspire your own original classroom activities — the spirit of these lessons is to connect current events to actions that make your community a better place for everyone!
SUMMARY
Judy Woodruff recently examined how the loss of thousands of local newspapers across the country is depriving communities of some of the glue that holds them together and whether or not that change is fueling division.
Woodruff now looks at how some news outlets are managing to hang on and whether what they’re doing is sustainable. It’s part of the series, America at a Crossroads.
For a transcript of this story, click here.
News wrap alternative: Check out recent segments from the NewsHour, and choose the story you’re most interested in watching. You can make a Google doc copy of discussion questions that work for any of the stories here.
WARM UP QUESTIONS
- Who is Anne Adams, and what is her background?
- Where is Adams' paper based?
- What role have local papers had in uniting communities, according to this story?
- Why are many local news outlets failing?
- How has Mississippi Today managed to grow?
FOCUS QUESTIONS
When local newspapers fail, what do you think could take their place in helping to keep communities tied together and informed by similar information? Do you think it's an apt replacement? Why/why not?
News analysis: Why do you think Judy Woodruff told this story by focusing on a few local news sources?
Alternative: See, Think, Wonder: What did you notice? What did the story make you think? What story would you want to find out more about? Where would you go to learn more?
TAKE ACTION
If you could design an app to help news consumers identify reliable local news, how would you do it? What features would it include? Use this activity to plan out your app.
Finally, you can use this activity to track your own media diet. How much of your media diet is local news?
You can also use this guide for creating a pop-up translation clinic to find reliable local news sources, or translate ones that already exist.
Here's a key lesson in media literacy: You might also want to watch the following companion story about the loss of local news:
This project was funded under the 2024 Leonore Annenberg Civic Mission of the Nation Initiative, sponsored by the Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics. LAIC is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
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