twists and shouts

Like probably a lot of people, I’ve suffered from a bit of news fatigue since maybe 2006 or so, but especially this year, what with the…everything.

My academic and professional backgrounds lean heavily into writing and journalism, and that experience has led to some recent heart-to-hearts with family and friends about what to do when you’re presented with much more than you can ever really parse through.

The conversations have varied in tone and in length, but the fundamental questions are kind of always the same:

• How do you know what’s important?

• How do you know what’s true?

In between alternately acting like this and like this, I work in a digital media production house, which is a thing you may already know about me if you are reading this. One of the things we do well is distilling a sea of information down to the most essential bits and making it all easy to understand for a diverse set of viewers.

To attack this particular information overload, I turned to the professionals in the realm of media literacy—that is, people who’ve dedicated their careers to helping people understand the information they take in—and put together some of the basics into a digestible script. Then, our incredible production staff put those words to very cute moving pictures, and here’s the final result.

It’s an entry-level intro to critically thinking about a news and information landscape that’s moving beneath our feet. Nobody has all the answers, certainly not us, but I think asking ourselves questions is just as important.