What is media? Who is a journalist? Who decides what becomes a story? How can someone tell whether a story is factual, misleading or AI-generated? Why should someone trust a journalist?
At the 2026 SPJ conference in Columbus, Ohio, journalists learned about an initiative in Georgia that helps communities understand how journalism works.
For Katja Ridderbusch, an independent journalist in Atlanta and the immediate past president of SPJ Georgia, that work starts by meeting people where they are.
During the “From Newsrooms to Neighborhoods: Spreading Media Knowledge One Community at a Time” session Oct. 1, Ridderbusch introduced Georgia Knows Media, a media education campaign created by SPJ Georgia to share knowledge about how journalism works into community spaces.
SPJ attendees learn about SPJ Georgia’s Georgia Knows Media campaign. Photo by McKenna Manzo.
SPJ Georgia launched Georgia Knows Media with support from an SPJ Foundation grant. The program is designed for groups ranging from churches and homeowners associations to high schools, civic organizations and other community groups. Rather than telling people to trust journalists, the training focuses on explaining how journalism works and giving community members tools to evaluate the information they encounter.
The program’s training covers the difference between news media and social media, along with the editorial process behind deciding what gets reported. It also addresses the relationship between journalists and their sources, how news organizations are funded and how AI is changing the information environment.
About 50 journalists have been trained so far, and the goal is to train more who can then serve as “media education ambassadors.” Community participants can also become facilitators, spreading the training through their own communities.
“The goal is really to train those journalists who are embedded in these communities,” said Ridderbusch, explaining that journalists who already know their communities may better understand local concerns. Community members may also be more willing to listen to a journalist they know, even when they disagree with that person.
SPJ Georgia intentionally avoids calling the program “media literacy,” Ridderbusch said, because the phrase can suggest that people who need the training are uninformed or unintelligent. Instead, Georgia Knows Media focuses on helping people better understand the news and the people who produce it.
Sara Catania, board member for SPJ and president of the Solutions Journalism Network, raised a question about what it means for journalists to both live in and report on the communities they cover. She said journalists who are members of a community have to navigate the relationship between their responsibilities as community members and their responsibilities as journalists.
Another audience member questioned how local journalists can distinguish themselves from national news organizations when community members are frustrated by something they saw in national coverage.
Georgia Knows Media discusses how different news outlets serve different audiences and use different formats, Ridderbusch said, rather than treating one form of journalism as inherently better than another.
Ridderbusch said SPJ Georgia hopes to pair the workshops with visits to local newsrooms and continue adapting the curriculum based on what journalists and community members need.
Surveys have provided early insight into how participants respond to these conversations, but the organization is looking for other ways to track the program’s progress and understand whether the conversation leads to lasting changes in how people engage with news.