The current period is a critical one for helping our students to avoid misinformation – and disinformation – but doing so is made more difficult by young people’s reliance on social media for news. AMICAL has partnered with DailyChatter to help meet this challenge, raising students’ awareness and critical understanding of global current affairs through free access to the DailyChatter news digest service.

Students are more likely to get their news through social media - and have trouble gauging its quality

Stanford’s 2016 “Civic Online Reasoning” study of students’ information-evaluation competencies, along with its 2019 follow-up study, highlighted the difficulty young people have with gauging the quality of information they come across online. Recent Pew studies show meanwhile that college-age adults look to social media more than anywhere else for their news, and that those who do rely on social media for their news tend to be less critical, less engaged readers.

Help our students explore more reliable news-gathering channels

As people interested in cultivating our students’ critical use and sharing of information, what can AMICAL Consortium members do about this? One thing we can do is encourage our students to make regular use of news-gathering channels that are more reliable than social media.

A great example of such a channel is DailyChatter, an email news digest focused solely on international news. DailyChatter is completely independent and non-partisan, and such a source can be particularly valuable in combination with an awareness of the bias of various news outlets (see Ad Fontes Media’s Media Bias Chart). The daily newsletter arrives by email at around 6am US Eastern time, includes a brief and easily readable digest of selected international stories with links to further media coverage from a variety of outlets.

Join other AMICAL institutions in facilitating students’ free subscription to DailyChatter

DailyChatter is now providing free subscriptions to college and university students around the world, and I’m pleased to announce a consortial partnership to facilitate subscriptions to their daily newsletter for all students, as well as faculty and staff, at AMICAL member institutions via the sign-up form linked below.

The free subscription program was launched to help expand college students’ knowledge and understanding of global issues, which is now more than ever an essential civic need. More than 9500 students from 155 leading US and international colleges and universities are now enrolled in the program.

Nine AMICAL institutions have already arranged their own direct partnerships with DailyChatter, and anyone from those institutions will be redirected from the AMICAL form below with a link to their own institution-specific sign-up page.

If you’re from any other AMICAL institution…

Sign up for DailyChatter through AMICAL

…and share this with your students and colleagues

You can share the link above with students, but I encourage you in particular to share it with any colleagues who might be in a position to reach out to the student body as a whole with a message about critical news sourcing: library directors, provosts, or others such as deans or directors of student life/services. As examples: AUP’s President Celeste Schenck chose to announce DailyChatter with an email of her own to the AUP community, and one of Yale’s student service offices decided to promote DailyChatter on their homepage.

Feel free to copy or adapt this example student-directed announcement to announce DailyChatter to your own community.

Questions about DailyChatter?

Please reach out directly to Elizabeth Bartle, Director, University Relations and Strategy, ebartle@dailychatter.com, if you have any questions. She can help you to launch the service on your own campus.