10/29/2025

NewsGuard Launches NewsGuard Academy, Providing Free Media Literacy Tools and Boosting Information Resilience

Video series and practical tools empower readers to spot false claims, viral hoaxes, and AI-generated online content

New York, NY — NewsGuard today announced the launch of NewsGuard Academy, a public-facing media literacy initiative designed to equip users with practical skills to identify hoaxes, manipulated media, and other forms of false claims spreading online.

In tandem with Media Literacy Week, hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) with participation from partner organizations, “NewsGuard is proud to expand its mission of promoting news reliability by offering accessible, journalist-led resources for the general public, schools, and universities,” said Matt Skibinski, NewsGuard’s Chief Operating Officer. “NewsGuard Academy helps users and readers develop critical thinking habits and practical verification techniques to navigate today’s complex information landscape,” he added.

NewsGuard Academy includes a video series offering step-by-step expert guidance on how to spot and debunk falsehoods online. Each short tutorial breaks down real-life examples of deepfakes, false narratives, and viral hoaxes and explains the tools and methods NewsGuard’s analysts use to debunk these false claims. With topics such as “How to Spot a Sora AI Video” and “How to Detect Phony Claims about Campaign Donations,” NewsGuard Academy applies analyst expertise to generate practical insights for readers of all skill levels to better spot false claims.

NewsGuard Academy videos and other resources will be available publicly through NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter and across NewsGuard’s social media channels, including YouTube. NewsGuard Academy will also be available to educators and institutions for integration of its resources into classrooms, workshops, and news literacy programs.

About NewsGuard

NewsGuard helps consumers and enterprises find reliable information online with transparent and apolitical data and tools. Founded in 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s global staff of information reliability analysts has collected, updated, and deployed more than seven million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all the top false narratives spreading online.

NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.

Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95 percent of online engagement with news across ten countries.