Media Literacy and Learning Project
2026 Finalist
Media associated with this campaign
Overview of this campaign
The Media Literacy and Learning Project has four major goals: to address the need for media literacy education and competencies in youth; to create community between media and education; to provide subject-specific, quality media examples for classroom use; and to invite deeper learning and critical thinking when it comes to media creation and consumption.
To meet these goals, this project has three main components. The first, which launched in October 2025, is the student press, an in-house developed newspaper-creation tool that allows any school, anywhere in Manitoba to create a newspaper for free in just just a few clicks. The technology is intentionally basic, so the typical barriers to access and use are minimal. The Press Kid web app — found in the Media Literacy and Learning section of the Free Press’s website — contains templates of various front and interior pages so students and teachers can simply copy and paste text, add photos from their computer, write a headline and have a completed story on the page in minutes, including a custom masthead. When a newspaper is complete, educators then have the ability to upload it to the “newsstand,” where it will then be publicly available.
The second, coming in Spring 2026, is the resource bundles for teachers and educators.This is a massive undertaking; each day, three to five Free Press stories will have the paywall removed so teachers have up-to-date, relevant content to use in their lessons. These daily stories are available in addition to hundreds of others that have already been manually tagged and organized by school-subject topic to create an easily searchable database of factual, trusted and free news. Teachers will also have access to the “bundle builder,” a customizable, buffet-style lesson-plan builder that allows them to add learning experiences, news articles, pre-made lesson plans, videos and more to a bundle that exports as an easy-to-follow PDF.
And the third is a micro-credential teachers can acquire from a recognized post-secondary institution; this is still in development.
Results for this campaign
Results are still incoming, as this is an ongoing initiave, however since its launch at the end of October 2025, we have consistently seen 500 or more site views daily on our Media Literacy and Learning Program homepage at www.winnipegfreepress.com/education. In that short time, we also already have five student newspapers up on our publicly available newsstand, with dozens more in the works.
As part of this initiative, we have also welcomed hundreds of students to the Free Press building over the past six months, allowing them to speak directly with journlalists, editors, copy editors and photographers to ask questions about how a newspaper, and news, comes together.
In a letter of support from Winnipeg School Divison Superintendent Matt Henderson, he states that the impact of this program on students has been profound. "Rather than positioning learners as passive consumers of information, the resource invites them into active inquiry."
"At its core, the Winnipeg Free Press Media Literacy resource exemplifies the public good of journalism," he writes in his letter. "It demonstrates how a newspaper can extend its impact beyond reporting the news to actively strengthening the democratic fabric of society. By partnering with public education and government, the Winnipeg Free Press has created a model of civic leadership that is scalable, sustainable, and deeply responsive to the need of young people and educators alike."
