We live in a world where almost anyone can perform acts of journalism — collect, interpret, and distribute information — without the geographical barriers, market taboos, or societal biases that constrain legacy news organizations, but also without editorial processes or professional standards. This decentralized, increasingly visual information ecosystem has reshaped how the public understands everything, from the military raid that killed Osama Bin Laden to patterns of police violence against Black Americans to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. It has empowered all sorts of readers to curate stories from their myriad points of view. However, this many-to-many system also makes it hard to distinguish reliable reporting from false, inaccurate, and intentionally misleading tales and conspiracy theories. The core activity in this course is Share a Story, a daily practice in which students choose one story each day and briefly explain to their classmates through an interactive web application what happened, why it matters, and where they found the story. Lectures and readings will cover the history of news and introduce students to fundamental journalistic concepts (accuracy, verification, attribution) and structures (lede, nutgraf, quotes) as they play out across contemporary media, from wire stories to mobile video. Section meetings will further explore these concepts and structures, in part through discussions of stories shared by members of the section. Students will have access to their Share a Story data in real-time and talk about how to interpret this data. They will produce an evidence-based final reflection paper on how their own news consumption and curation habits developed over the semester. Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section of this course. [This ULEC is in category 1, Tools for Social Change.]