MediaWise Campus Correspondents: A New JMC Opportunity

The JMC department has exciting news for AUBG students, eager to enhance their professional experience by educating others about disinformation and misinformation.

On March 26, an info session regarding the Campus Correspondents project took place at Aspire. The initiative mirrors MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents project in the USA, conducted by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school and research organization focusing on teaching digital literacy skills.

For this reason, the MediaWise Campus Correspondents program was created in 2020, just before the last presidential elections in the USA. Since then, college students in the States have taught thousands of their peers functional digital media literacy skills to help fight misinformation. 

This year, the MediaWise Program wants to expand and hire campus correspondents from AUBG who will create video materials for lectures covering the mentioned topics. These students will present materials on media literacy, fake news, and how to spot them at various Bulgarian universities and high schools while also promoting the program.

The Campus Correspondents will deliver workshops in person and virtually, guiding their peers in identifying and combating misinformation and disinformation. The chosen Campus Correspondents (CC) will be trained beforehand and paid $200 per workshop session that they deliver. 

During the session, the representatives Brittani Kollar and Kathleen Tobin elaborated on the program's details. 

Kathleen Tobin runs the Campus Correspondents Program in the USA. She shared: “The Poynter Institute is a school for professional journalists.” She added: “In the MediaWise program, we teach people how to be aware of what is real and what is fake.”

Tobin started the session with a warm-up game with images. The students had to say whether the image was real or AI-generated. The point was to show tips and tricks for recognizing AI images online. Tobin shared that one should pay attention to the details, such as accessories and body parts like hands and ears.

The Poynter Institute also creates cross-border initiatives (in Canada, Brazil, and Germany) where, according to Kollar and Tobin, “journalism is used to confront society’s complex problems.” One of the institute's missions is to research the increasing number of people who have seen false and misleading information and fallen into the trap of resharing it.

A former CC, Loren Miranda from the USA, who joined the session through Zoom, shared her valuable experience as a digital media literacy correspondent. She mentioned that her presentational skills improved through the MediaWise program and her public speaking improved by talking to whole classes and answering students' questions. Moreover, Miranda learned to shorten information “as the attention span is short nowadays.”

The future candidates can be from different standings and ethnicities since the Bulgarian educational institution visits will be held in English or Bulgarian. 

The dual learning process, inherent in fact-checking, renders this opportunity particularly valuable. Miranda captures this sentiment, affirming: "Through every story I had to double-check, I learned how to make sure that my own content is better as a JMC student."

The project is poised for continued growth, with ongoing updates from the JMC department to follow suit. You can contact Prof. Darina Sarelska or Prof. Laura Kelly for any questions related to this project.

Editors: Niya Manditsch and David Mitov