20 Small Acts of Media Literacy We Can Practice Every Day

From checking the date to tracing the source: building a sharper eye for information.

In case you missed it: There’s a special announcement at the end about what’s coming next for Card Catalog. Exciting times!

Before most of us have finished our coffee on any given morning, we’ve already made dozens of decisions about information. We’ve scrolled past headlines, paused on a thumbnail, tapped a link a friend shared, skimmed the first paragraph of something, and decided whether to keep reading or move on. Each of those micro-decisions involved a judgment about credibility and trust, and we made them so fast that they didn’t feel like decisions at all.

The information environment we move through is built for velocity: algorithmic feeds that prioritize engagement over accuracy, headlines designed to capture attention, content that circulates faster than context can follow. We’re encountering vastly more information per day than previous generations did, and the infrastructure delivering that information to us has its own set of incentives, business models, editorial choices, and design priorities baked into every layer. When that infrastructure is invisible to us, we’re engaging with the output without the full picture of how it reached us.

Media literacy, as it’s usually framed, sounds like a big educational undertaking: courses, frameworks, workshops with five-step evaluation rubrics - and those of course have their place. But the version that makes a lasting difference in everyday life tends to look less like a curriculum and more like a collection of small, repeatable habits. A glance at the URL before clicking. A pause before sharing something that made us furious. A scroll to the “About” page we’ve never visited on a site we read every week.

And these habits build on each other. The first few times we check a byline or find a section label, it might feel deliberate and slightly slow. But the repetition builds a kind of muscle memory. We start seeing patterns in how stories are built and sourced, identifying structural choices that were invisible before. And at some point, the effort can drop away entirely, woven into how we read rather than applied as a separate layer.

The twenty habits below are focused on published content: news articles, opinion pieces, newsletters, blog posts, and other formats where someone has written and presented information for an audience. (Social media has its own version of these habits, which we address at the end.) Wherever someone is presenting claims or framing a story, structural choices are shaping what reaches us; those choices are visible once we know where to search. The list is organized from the simplest habits to the most analytical, so the first few are things we can start doing today, and the later ones develop gradually with practice.

Photo by Chris Fuller on Unsplash

Before we start reading

The simplest media literacy habits require nothing more than a shift in where we direct our attention. These five are the easiest to practice, and they work on any article, post, or link we encounter.

1. Check the publication date.

Search for the date near the headline or the byline (the author’s name), usually in small text. Online content recirculates routinely, and a 2019 study on remote work can show up in a 2026 social media post without anyone flagging that the data predates the event that reshaped remote work for everyone. If the article predates a major development in its field, its conclusions may no longer be accurate - it’s difficult to know without checking when the piece was published. An article from 2021 isn’t automatically wrong, but the date tells us whether to read it as current analysis or historical context. That distinction affects how we weigh its claims, especially in fast-moving fields like public health and technology policy.

2. Check the URL before clicking.

Before we open a link, the URL is visible in the address bar, in the preview text of a shared post, or when we hover over a hyperlink. The domain tells us a lot: a .gov is a government source, a .edu is an academic institution, a .org is often a nonprofit, and a .com can range from a major newspaper to a personal blog. The rest of the URL adds context too: a recognizable publication name carries different weight than a site with seventeen hyphens and a name we’ve never encountered. If the domain is unfamiliar, that’s an invitation to search the publication’s name alongside words like “bias,” “funding,” or “ownership” to see what comes up.

3. Read the byline (or ask why there isn’t one).

The byline is the official credit line that names the reporter or creator of a piece, usually appearing just below the headline. Many outlets make the author’s name clickable, leading to a page with their other articles and a brief bio. A staff reporter who has covered the education beat for six years is telling us something different from a freelancer whose previous pieces span four unrelated verticals. If the byline shows a general-assignment reporter writing about a highly specialized topic, the reporting may still be strong, but checking whether the quotes come from authoritative sources within the field adds useful context. When there’s no byline at all, that’s information too: it may mean the content was produced by a brand or by someone who doesn’t want to be identified with the claims being made.

4. Find the section label.

Above the headline, often in small grey or colored text, many publications include a label: “News,” “Opinion,” “Analysis,” “Sponsored Content,” or “Contributed.” These are different genres with different standards of evidence, but over the past decade the visual distinction between them has gotten harder to spot as publications have shifted toward cleaner, more uniform design (often rendering labels in small type that barely contrasts with the background). An opinion piece and a news report can look identical in layout, so the label is one of the few explicit indicators of what kind of content we’re reading. Finding it requires a conscious decision to direct our eyes above the headline and scan for small text. If we discover we’re reading an opinion piece we might initially have considered as factual news, the arguments aren’t automatically invalid, but the standard of evidence is different: opinion pieces present a point of view, while news reporting is expected to present multiple perspectives.

5. Compare the headline to the article.

Headlines are designed to do two things at once: communicate what a story is about and compel us to click. The tension between those goals creates a gap between what a headline implies and what the article contains. After reading an article, going back and re-reading the headline can be revealing: did the headline accurately represent the reporting, or did it frame the story in a way that’s more dramatic or more alarming than what the article supports? An emotionally charged headline paired with a measured, nuanced article is a common combination, and developing the habit of comparing the two teaches us to treat headlines as their own separate piece of communication rather than as reliable summaries.

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While we’re reading

Once we’re reading, a different set of editorial decisions becomes visible: who funded the reporting, who was quoted, what was photographed, how the story is structured. These are all choices shaped by the publication’s priorities and the practical constraints of producing the story, and they shape the information we take away.

6. Check the “About” page.

Most publications have one, usually linked in the header or the footer. The “About” page tells us what a publication says about itself: its editorial mission and its ownership structure. A site that describes itself as a “news organization” and one that calls itself an “advocacy organization” can produce content that looks identical in our feed. (The difference is in the editorial framework: a news organization aims to present multiple perspectives, while an advocacy organization produces content in service of a specific position or cause.) On the “About” page, search for specific details: who owns the publication, how it’s funded, how long it’s been operating, and whether it has a named editorial team or stated editorial standards. The specificity of that page tells us how much the publication has invested in its own transparency.

7. Read past the first two paragraphs.

News articles are structured to front-load the most important information and add context as they go, but “most important” is an editorial judgment. Complicating details and dissenting perspectives are placed deeper in the article, because the structure is designed to lead with the strongest, most streamlined version of the story. It’s common to form an initial impression from a headline and then discover deeper in the piece that a significant caveat reframes the whole story. That caveat is lower in the article precisely because someone decided the uncomplicated version should come first. The deeper we read, the more we encounter the counterarguments and contextual details that the opening had to leave out in order to lead with the strongest version of the story.

8. Check if the study is linked.

When an article mentions research, search for a hyperlink on or near the phrase “a new study” or the name of the research institution. Some outlets hyperlink to the original paper; many don’t. When the study isn’t linked, we can’t check the number of people studied and the methods used, or whether the article’s characterization matches the findings. If the article names a study or the institution behind it, a search can often turn up the original paper so we can compare the source to the summary. If we do find the original, scanning the abstract (the summary at the top of the paper) for the researchers’ own stated limitations is revealing, because those limitations are often left out of the media coverage; the gap between what a study found and what the headline says the study found can be enormous.

9. Examine the lead image (or ask why there isn’t one).

When an article includes an image, consider why this particular image was chosen. An article about a protest could run a photo of a peaceful crowd or a burning car, and each choice tells a completely different story before a single word of text registers. Even within a single image, the crop shapes the narrative: a tight frame on one confrontation excludes the wider scene ten feet outside the edge. When we form an opinion about an event we didn’t witness, the photograph on the story may be doing more to shape that opinion than the text. Comparing different outlets’ image selections for the same event is especially revealing, because the editorial reasoning behind each selection becomes visible in the contrast.

10. Check our emotional state before sharing.

The content most likely to circulate is content that provokes a strong emotional spike: outrage, anxiety, awe, amusement. The pattern has been documented in research on sharing behavior: the stronger the emotional charge, the faster we share. If we catch ourselves reaching for the share button while our pulse is elevated, that’s a good reason to pause - urgency tends to short-circuit evaluation. The story could be entirely accurate, but the pause creates space to find out before we amplify the claim.

11. Reverse-image-search a photo that seems out of context.

When a dramatic image is circulating without clear information about who took it or where it originated, we can verify where it came from. In most browsers, right-clicking or long-pressing an image gives us the option to search for where else it appears online. We may discover the photo is from a different event or year entirely, or pulled from a stock photo library. Visual misinformation works in part because a photograph feels like seeing something firsthand, even though the angle and crop are editorial choices just like word choice in a written article. A reverse search that traces the image to a different event or a stock library immediately changes how we evaluate the claim the image was supporting.

The choices behind the reporting

These habits involve reading more analytically, with paying attention to the choices a reporter and editor have made in how a story is constructed. Where the previous sections focused on what to check and what to read, this section focuses on the editorial decisions embedded in the story itself.

12. Ask who paid for this.

The way a publication makes money affects what it publishes. An outlet that depends on advertising revenue needs to generate large audiences, which creates pressure toward attention-grabbing content. A subscription-funded outlet has different incentives: it needs to provide enough value that readers keep paying. Grant-funded journalism and venture-backed media each operate under their own set of pressures, as do government-funded outlets. Search for funding information on the “About” page or in donor acknowledgments; for nonprofit outlets, their tax filings (searchable on sites like ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer) can reveal whose priorities are being served.

13. Identify who’s quoted (and who isn’t).

A news story quotes a limited number of sources, and who made that list is an editorial decision. The quoted voices might be officials, experts, affected community members, or industry representatives. The pattern of who gets quoted reveals whose perspective the reporter had access to and chose to center. For example, a story about housing policy that quotes officials and developers but no tenants is telling one version of a complex situation. When we identify who’s quoted, we’re also identifying who isn’t. That absence can tell us as much as the text, and it gives us a concrete starting point for seeking out the perspectives the story didn’t include.

14. Identify the unnamed sources.

“Officials say,” “experts believe,” “sources close to the matter.” Scan for these phrases, because they indicate that a claim is being made without anyone putting their name on the record. Anonymous sourcing has legitimate uses: protecting whistleblowers and shielding sources who face professional consequences for speaking publicly. But it’s also the mechanism through which institutions leak proposals to test public reaction before officially committing to them (also known as trial balloons), or place favorable coverage without anyone being accountable for the claims. When we spot unnamed sourcing, the useful question is: why might this source want to remain anonymous, and does the reason seem protective or strategic?

15. Pay attention to the verb introducing each quote.

The verb a reporter uses to introduce a quote is an editorial choice. “Says,” “claims,” “admits,” “reveals,” “concedes”: each one carries a different implication. “The CEO said profits were up” and “the CEO claimed profits were up” contain identical factual content and completely different implications about whether the reporter finds the statement credible. “Admitted” suggests guilt; “revealed” implies the information was previously hidden; “insisted” implies resistance to contradictory evidence. The framing verb is where a writer’s assessment enters the text without announcing itself, and once we tune into that pattern, the verbs become one of the clearest indicators of how the reporter views the people they’re quoting.

16. Trace a story back to its original source.

When multiple publications all run the same framing on the same day, they're usually drawing from the same origin: a wire service like the Associated Press or Reuters, which sends pre-written articles to hundreds of outlets that each rewrite them slightly. Searching for the headline in quotes can often surface the original wire report, which will have an AP or Reuters tag at the top. Reading the original gives us the raw version before each outlet added its own framing and headline, and it can reveal details or caveats that were trimmed in the rewriting.

The larger systems behind the story

Stories sit inside larger systems: editorial conventions, business models, publication norms, and platform architectures. These habits build familiarity with those systems, and they’re what distinguish casual reading from fluent, informed reading.

17. Read the correction notice.

If an article has an update or correction appended, read the whole thing. Corrections are usually found at the bottom of the article, set apart in italics or a different font, and they reveal what the publication got wrong initially and how they chose to handle the error. A publication that issues clear, specific corrections is demonstrating an editorial process that values accuracy over appearance; the correction is evidence that the machinery works. But a publication that silently edits articles without noting the changes has made a choice about transparency that tells us something about how that outlet handles accountability.

18. Examine what surrounds the article.

On a webpage, the content surrounding an article tells us something about the publication’s business model and the algorithmic assumptions being made about us as readers. Scan what gets recommended in the sidebar, what appears in the “you may also like” section, and what kind of advertising runs alongside the text. A publication whose sidebar features its own long-form investigations is operating under a different model than one whose sidebar is populated entirely by third-party clickbait from an advertising network. A serious investigative piece surrounded by clickbait thumbnails and supplement ads is sending two messages at once: one about the journalism, and one about the business model sustaining the publication.

19. Read the same story from a second source.

When a story is important enough to form an opinion about or share with someone, searching for the same event from a different outlet is one of the highest-return habits on this list. The facts that appear in both accounts are more likely to be reliable than claims unique to one, because two independent newsrooms arrived at them separately. The details that appear in one account but not the other reveal each outlet’s framing decisions: what each chose to emphasize and whose perspective each chose to center. This comparison trains us to see framing as a choice rather than as the story itself. The search takes one query (the topic or headline), and the comparison between two accounts often reveals more about how the story was constructed than either account reveals on its own.

20. Ask what’s missing from this story.

An article is a set of choices about what to include and what to leave out, made under constraints of time, space, access, and editorial priority. The gaps in a story are often invisible from inside the story itself: common gaps include the perspectives of people directly affected by a policy or decision and the historical context that preceded the current event. When we’re reading about a corporate merger, for instance, the workers at the affected companies are often the last voices to appear in the coverage, if they appear at all. What would we need to know to have a more complete picture, and where might we search?

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On social media

The habits above are designed for published content, but social media is where many of us first encounter the claims and headlines that shape our understanding of what’s happening. A typical social media post has no editor, no fact-checker, no correction process, and no obligation to present evidence for its claims - which means the work of evaluating the information falls entirely on us as readers. The structural features are different from published articles, but the underlying instinct is the same: identify the choices shaping the information before we engage with it or pass it along.

1. Check the account, not just the post.

When we see a claim on social media, the account sharing it is the first piece of context to examine. Tap the username and look at the profile: when the account was created, what the bio says, what else the account has posted, and how the posting patterns compare to the claim being made. A recently created account sharing inflammatory content during a breaking news event is operating differently from a longstanding presence with a consistent track record on a specific topic. The posting history gives us a sense of whether this account has a track record on the topic or is engaging with it for the first time.

2. Find the original source when a post makes a claim.

Many social media posts reference articles or events without linking to them. When a post says “a new study shows” or “reports are saying,” search for the specific claim to find the original source. If the post does include a link, open the link and read what’s at the other end before sharing: the article may say something different from what the post claims. Posts that describe an article’s findings in provocative language while linking to a measured, cautious piece of reporting are a common pattern, and the most direct way to spot that pattern is to click through. When there’s no link at all, the absence is itself a data point about how easy the poster has made verification.

3. Search for the full version when a clip or screenshot is circulating.

One of the most common ways information gets distorted on social media is through decontextualization: a 10-second video clip pulled from a 30-minute speech, a screenshot of a headline without the article, a single sentence from a longer thread. When something provocative is circulating as a fragment, copy a distinctive phrase from the caption or text and paste it into a search engine; for video clips, search the speaker’s name and a keyword from the quote to find the full interview or broadcast. A quote that sounds outrageous in isolation may be measured in context; a headline that sounds alarming may sit atop an article that’s far more nuanced. The fragment is doing editorial work by choosing what to show and what to cut, and finding the original lets us see what was left out.

4. Scan the post for engagement-bait patterns before sharing.

Some social media posts are structured for engagement rather than communication, and the structural cues are consistent enough to learn. Phrases like “I bet you won’t share this,” “They don’t want you to see this,” or “EXPOSED” from accounts that aren’t news organizations are designed to trigger a response before we’ve evaluated the substance. Vague references to “they” without naming a specific entity, artificial urgency (”BREAKING”) from non-journalists, and dramatic all-caps framing are all cues that a post is optimized for engagement rather than accuracy. Recognizing these patterns doesn’t mean the underlying claim is false, but it does tell us the post is structured to bypass our evaluation rather than support informed reading.

5. Read the replies before sharing.

On most platforms, the replies to a viral post are where corrections and counter-evidence surface first. If a post makes a dramatic claim, the top replies will often contain links to contradicting sources or factual corrections from people closer to the story. If the replies are full of people adding corroborating details, that’s one kind of indicator. If they’re full of people posting links that contradict the original claim, that’s another. Either way, the replies add context that the original post didn’t include, and reading them before sharing means we’re passing along a more complete picture.

Photo by Daniel Filipe Antunes Santos on Unsplash

Three things to be mindful of

The habits we’ve already formed as readers don’t reset when we start practicing new ones. How we’ve been reading for years continues to influence how we apply new evaluation habits, sometimes in ways that work against us. Three tendencies in particular are helpful to recognize as we develop these skills.

We're more likely to apply these habits to content we disagree with than to content that confirms what we already believe.

Our instinct is to scrutinize information that challenges our existing views and to accept information that aligns with them without the same rigor. A headline that fits our worldview can feel so self-evidently true that checking the source or comparing it to a second account doesn't seem necessary. The place these habits are hardest to apply is exactly where they're most needed: on the stories that already feel right to us.

Not everything we read calls for all of these habits at once.

A movie review or a lighthearted feature doesn’t call for the same level of evaluation as a news story about public policy or a viral claim about a public health crisis. These habits are for content that’s shaping our understanding of important issues, content we’re about to share with someone else, and content that’s asking us to accept a significant claim. Applying them selectively, based on what’s at stake, keeps the practice sustainable over time.

A single red flag doesn’t invalidate an entire article.

Finding that an article was funded by an industry group, or that a story quoted officials but no affected community members, changes how we read the claims, but it doesn’t mean the reporting is wrong. An article from a major newspaper with a named reporter and linked sources occupies a different position on the trust spectrum than an anonymous blog post with no sourcing, but neither is beyond question and neither is automatically disposable. These habits are designed to build a more textured, better-informed sense of how much confidence to place in any given piece of information, based on what we can observe about how it was produced.

What these habits build

These habits, across published content and social media, share something in common: they make the invisible architecture of information visible. This is the same skill that trained librarians bring to their work. A librarian understands classification systems, publication processes, editorial decisions, and funding structures, and that understanding makes them a better, more fluent reader of the information environment. They know that a university press monograph and a self-published paperback with no editorial review both sit on the same shelf, and they know how to evaluate the editorial process and institutional credibility behind each one. They know that a search engine returns results shaped by the algorithm’s priorities, and they adjust accordingly. The underlying skill is structural awareness: seeing the decisions that shape information before it reaches the reader.

That’s what these habits build toward: something closer to peripheral vision for the architecture of information. We start to register the funding model, the sourcing pattern, the framing choices, the platform design. We identify who’s speaking and who isn’t, what’s linked and what’s asserted without evidence. These observations accumulate, and over time, they require less conscious effort as they become part of how we read.

Once these habits take hold, we start to see concretely what good information infrastructure looks like: linked sources, named reporters, transparent funding, published corrections. That recognition shapes both what we choose to read and what we choose to pass along. When we share a well-sourced article with our networks, or subscribe to a publication that corrects its errors, we're shaping the information environment for everyone connected to us.

A few readers have asked how to support the work outside of a subscription, so here’s another option. If something here has resonated with you or been helpful, this is one more way to show appreciation. Thank you for reading, always.

You might also like:

• A Non-Exhaustive List of Sources for When You Need Real Information, Not Just Content: How to find trustworthy sources for breaking news, health questions, financial decisions, and local elections.

• The Skill That Stands Between Us and Panic: Why the ability to evaluate information is how fear becomes manageable.

• Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.: 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won’t, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

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Special announcement!

The Card Catalog Classroom opens one week from today, on June 23!

The Classroom modules will turn every teachable article into a structured lesson with prompts and exercises that a standalone piece can’t carry, extending both the depth and the usefulness of what we cover in the articles. Full courses on topics like AI literacy and media literacy are in development too, alongside future recorded workshops. The Classroom is designed to grow.

The Reference Collection is the other half of the project: a browsable, searchable directory of every archive, database, framework, and tip I’ve ever shared in a Note (organized into categories and annotated so you know exactly what each resource is and how to use it). Instead of scrolling through the Notes feed hoping to relocate something, you can search a keyword and find it easily. Every new Note folds into the collection as it’s published, so the directory keeps growing over time. Good information is findable information, and this is what that looks like in practice.

Everything is hosted on Circle, which gives me the structure to organize all of this properly. Substack stays exactly where it is for the free articles and Notes; all existing paid benefits (AI Briefings, Librarian Hotline, Research Packets, Founding Member Report) continue as they always have, and will also be featured and findable in the Circle library alongside everything new.

Paid subscription pricing shifts when the Classroom launches: from $8 a month and $80 a year to $10 a month and $100 a year. Anyone who becomes a paid subscriber before June 23 locks in the current rate permanently, even through any future increases. A dedicated email with the full breakdown of what's inside and how to get started goes out on launch day. I can't wait to open the doors. ☺️

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Have you read the Founding Member Report: The State of AI yet?

A comprehensive guide for information navigators who want to understand where AI is actually heading and what it means for how we find, evaluate, and use information in 2026.

→ Find out more here.

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