In early March of 2020, with funding from Facebook, I arranged for 10 students from across the country to travel to Poynter to train as our first-ever Campus Correspondents cohort (yep, do that calendar calculus).
They came from places like Michigan State, Stony Brook and Mississippi State.
Our plan was for each of them to go back to their campuses and train student groups like newspapers,
Sororities and political clubs to tell fact from fiction online.
Did I mention this was early March 2020?
By the grace of God, none of those students got sick from what would be an international crisis just a week later.
Instead, we made a Plan B: virtual classroom visits. (Remember when that seemed novel?)
Now here we are, two and a half years later,
And we’re still hard at work training college students to help their peers tell fact from fiction online.
Many of you have hosted our students in the past. Others still want to.