{"id":1633,"date":"2025-12-23T22:21:59","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T22:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/?p=1633"},"modified":"2026-01-09T02:15:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T02:15:45","slug":"journalism-researchers-just-discovered-what-i-was-writing-about-twenty-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/2025\/12\/23\/journalism-researchers-just-discovered-what-i-was-writing-about-twenty-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism Researchers Just \u201cDiscovered\u201d What I Was Writing About Twenty Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When \u201cNews Literate Journalism\u201d Suddenly Arrived<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a new<\/a>, much\u2011shared article<\/a> in News Research Journal titled \u201cCreating a news literate journalism: A metacognitive model for journalism practice.\u201d It presents a framework where journalists are taught to think about how they think, to interrogate their own processes, and to become \u201cnews literate\u201d about their own work, not just about the misinformation their audiences face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author talks about metacognition, self\u2011reflection, and curricular models that ask journalism students to reflect on how they gather, verify, and frame information, as if this is a timely revelation the profession has been waiting for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Problem With Reinventing the Wheel<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

News literacy and metacognitive journalism are not new ideas that magically appeared in 2025. For years, journalism scholarship and foundations have been circling the same themes: media literacy, self\u2011conscious reasoning among journalists, and \u201clearning\u2011oriented\u201d news practice. There are entire frameworks, grants, and institutes dedicated to teaching people how to verify information, recognize bias, and reflect on how news is produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet every few years, a new paper shows up that renames the same terrain, acts as if it has discovered an uncharted continent, and treats everything outside academic journals and institutional white papers as if it never existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I Wrote Long Before This \u201cModel\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My work has been in this space for decades, and it did not need the label \u201cmetacognitive model\u201d to exist. Books such as Don\u2019t Believe It!: How Lies Become News<\/em> (2005) explicitly teach readers how to verify information, evaluate sources and eyewitnesses, and logically deconstruct how lies are laundered into \u201cnews.\u201d That book functions as a step\u2011by\u2011step manual in news literacy and verification, long before \u201cnews literacy\u201d became a funding buzzword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later books like When Journalism Was a Thing<\/em>, A New Approach to Journalism<\/em>, and Loaded Language and the Dilemma of Journalism<\/em> push the conversation further by dissecting propaganda, ideological framing, and the emotional and narrative tricks that journalists and outlets use to distort reality. Those works are not just about \u201cmedia consumers\u201d; they interrogate the profession\u2019s internal culture, cognitive shortcuts, and scripted narratives, which is exactly what \u201cnews literate journalism\u201d now claims as innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalism as Cognitive and Emotional Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The current article nods to metacognition: journalists should be aware of how they know what they know, and how they decide what counts as news. That acknowledgement is useful, but partial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my work, journalism is treated as a layered cognitive and emotional practice:<\/p>\n\n\n\n