Know the News

KTN uses an interactive, multimedia platform to provide users with the tools to think critically about TV news by interpreting news coverage in a global context. Visitors to the project website edit a variety of US and international TV news reports and create their own news talk programme using out-takes from a nationally broadcast studio-based discussion series. Students publish their remixes, which are rated by site visitors for journalistic qualities including fairness, accuracy, and style.

The website has tools and resources to facilitate classroom use for educators, and for sharing research and coursework with journalism students and academic researchers worldwide. Specifically, KTN offers these news literacy tools:

• A video Remixer that lets users edit any one of three sets of news clips from around the world, add their own commentary and research, and publish and share their work. Students can create comparative newscasts that reveal different points of view; remix clips to show how different news coverage can set different agendas; enlist varying viewpoints; and experience how media messages influence civil societies worldwide. The goal is to help students think comparatively and critically about how television news frames global issues.
• A ratings tool that lets users rate the remixes, and other news stories, for their journalistic qualities.
• The News Challenge quiz, which tests users' understanding of what they see and hear in TV news reports, using worldwide coverage of the most intriguing stories of the last year. The questions can be used to:
  • Lead a more in-depth discussion on TV news globally and its influence on understanding events
  • Compare and contrast different TV news coverage globally of the same event, issues, or topic
  • Discuss and debate the point of view in different TV newscasts around the world
  • Learn together about the fundamental value of diverse, independent, and credible reporting about an issue of international scope
  • Gain cultural tolerance of other nations and their news values
  • Enhance general understanding of the complex role of news media in global affairs
• A wiki where students can post their research and reports; and can add to our growing database of international TV facts.

While anyone can use these tools, they are designed to support media literacy studies for college-level communications and journalism students. Professors can sign their classes up using a special "class code" registration process that allows access to students' published remixes; upon request, organisers will add professor-selected TV news clips to the Remixer for class use.

Media Literacy.

KTN is a project of Link Media, Inc.'s LinkTV, a nationwide television channel providing a global perspectives on news, events, and culture. The KTN application uses Link TV's original series Global Pulse and Pulso Latino, which contrast and analyse news coverage produced by more than 70 broadcasters worldwide.

The frameworks for using KTN in the classroom are conceived with the idea of the student at the center of the learning process. Media literacy education stresses the engagement of the student with content, and the reflection on that engagement after the experience has concluded. The role of the educator using this tool is to help the student become: aware of the implications of news production; cognisant of how perspectives are altered by news outlets worldwide; appreciative of the necessity of news media in a civil society; and reflective of the complexities involved in TV news reporting.