From American Space Madrid, the International Institute and the Embassy of the United States, we organized a talk with Dámaso Reyes, photojournalist, visual narrator and project director of News Literacy Project, an NGO that has been bringing media education to the classroom for more than ten years.
Dámaso Reyes teaches courses to both professors and students on the impact of fake news in the media today. For this he has launched an e-learning platform called checkology where through interactive and multimedia classes, he teaches basic notions about the reception, preparation and broadcast of news on the Internet. Its objective is to facilitate the media literacy of the new generations. To this end, it teaches them to distinguish not only between an opinion piece and an informative piece, but also whether a website is offering disinterested information or has a lobbyist behind it. Likewise, it offers tools to facilitate the digestion of a huge amount of information and categorize it according to its origin, credibility or relevance.
In this talk, Dámaso Reyes will talk about the digital media landscape and some strategies to navigate (mis)information.
Speaker biography:
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Dámaso Reyes began his career as a storyteller more than fifteen years ago while still a teenager. As a young man growing up in one of the most marginalized neighborhoods in the United States, he was fascinated by the way his community was portrayed in the media. As an adult, he chose to pursue photojournalism to ensure greater diversity in the images presented to the public.
He has worked for various institutions and his work has appeared in publications including: The New York Times, United Nations Development Program, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, The miami herald, magazine New York, Der Spiegel y Time asia. Previous assignments and projects have taken him to countries such as Rwanda, Cuba, Indonesia, Tanzania, and to various corners of the United States and Europe.
His photographs have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in galleries in Barcelona, Spain; Berkeley, United States; Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary; Stuttgart, Germany; Buncrana, Ireland and Uster, Switzerland.
In addition to being a Fulbright Scholar in 2008, Dámaso Reyes has received several scholarships and awards. Among them: an Arthur F. Burns Scholarship; a Knight-Luce Fellowship for Global Journalistic Coverage; a French American Foundation Fellowship for Immigration Reporting; and a Holbrooke Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists.
Dámaso is also a project leader at the Institute for World Politics and the lead photographer for “The Europeans,” a photographic documentary project that is exploring the changes Europe and its people are experiencing as the European Union expands and integrates.