North Jersey Grassroots Presents: 'Fact or Fiction: What Makes News Credible'

North Jersey Grassroots (NJG) will present the first public program in northern New Jersey on news literacy entitled "Fact or Fiction: What Makes News Credible," June 3, 2010 at 7:30 pm at Bergen Community College- Moses TEC Center-128 in Paramus, New Jersey.

Speakers will include Dean Miller, Director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, William Murray, Executive Vice President of MWW Group and Editor, and Frank Burgos, Managing Editor of The Record.  Fact or Fiction program is FREE and open to the public.

News literacy is the ability to decipher and understand what constitutes credible news. The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, founded in 2007, is housed at the university's School of Journalism and is the first center of its kind in the U.S.

According to Dean Miller, "Democracies flourish when their citizens make decisions based on reliable information. In the digital age, much of the information is confusing, contradictory and often misleading which makes it all the more important to be able to decipher information and determine what is actually credible."

Speakers will discuss how news is created, and review the range of information sources from traditional and digital media to blogs, tweets, rumor and gossip outlets. The audience will be alerted to the skills needed to identify hype, punditry, advertising, bias, propaganda, and spin. A Q&A session will follow the presentations.

Ridgewood resident, Rhoda Schermer, Chairperson of NJG, stated, "The extraordinary flood of information and misinformation that surrounds us day and night has contributed to difficulties in discussing important issues.  We all need to learn how to judge what we are reading and hearing. How we evaluate information has consequences for the decisions we make as a society."

North Jersey Grassroots is a non-partisan education and advocacy organization with over 400 members in Bergen County and a BlueWave NJ affiliate.

Contact northjerseygrassroots1@gmail.com for more information. To obtain information about program participants' visit: www.stonybrook.edu/journalism/news literacy, www.mwwgroup.com, and www.bluewavenj.org.