Jenna Meleedy covered a variety of beats during her two years on staff at The Daily Collegian, but while she enjoyed the firsthand journalism experience, the media studies major craved a deeper purpose. “I needed to feel like I was having an impact on the most divisive issue that I could see in the country,” Meleedy says. “And I needed to come at that from a different perspective.”

As part of the News Literacy Initiative’s Student Ambassador program, Meleedy has been able to directly target that issue—media misinformation and disinformation that she believes are eroding democracy—by helping her fellow students learn more about the forces that create that misinformation and cause many young people to avoid the news altogether.

Meleedy (pictured) was part of the first News Literacy Ambassador Institute class in the fall of 2022, along with about a dozen other students. Once they complete the institute—which is now a 10-week, one-credit course that is offered online at campuses across the commonwealth as well as in person at University Park—student ambassadors help build the initiative’s website, create social media content, and lead in-class news literacy workshops in which they learn about their fellow students’ media consumption habits while giving them tips on how to tell responsible journalism from clickbait.

Meleedy introduced a new youth advisory council and presented resources for educators at a National Association for Media Literacy Education virtual conference in July, and she is teaching media literacy to grade-school students in the Czech Republic this fall as part of the Bellisario College’s CzechMates study abroad program. “I think it is absolutely critical to employ media literacy education across all schools in the future,” Meleedy says. “I think if children don’t grow up being taught these media literacy and news literacy skills, we’re failing them.”