Visiting scholar to present ‘Can You Trust Your Local News?’ lecture

Penny Muse Abernathy, a Knight Chair of journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will present her lecture “Can You Trust Your Local News,” Saturday, April 6, at 12:30 p.m. in Room 300 of Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.

Over the past decade and a half, the U.S. has lost 1,800 newspapers and half of its newspaper journalists, giving rise to news deserts across vast swaths of the country. Abernathy will explore the implications for our society and the collaborative effort necessary to reverse the trend.

The event is presented by the Fake News, Post-Truth and News Literacy research cluster and is supported by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the department of journalism and School of Information Sciences at Illinois.

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