Ask better questions.
The internet has plenty of answers. I’m more interested in the question that comes before them: How do you know?
The Deadline Plate: a YA time-travel mystery about student journalists. Read a free excerpt and find classroom resources.
“With news literacy, young people are able to use their rights and advocate for their interests more effectively. That is why I support Eric’s work.”
Mary Beth Tinker
Student free-expression advocate
National attention for the WATER lesson.
The Institute featured how Dr. Eric Jourgensen uses dihydrogen monoxide to teach fact-checking, context, and misinformation with student journalists before bringing the work to the 2026 National News Literacy Conference.
How a journalism instructor is teaching his students about fact-checking and misinformation through dihydrogen monoxide
It connects the classroom demonstration, WATER, and the larger question behind Everything I Told You Was True.
Read the feature
True facts can still build a false picture.
Everything I Told You Was True, a submission manuscript, follows that problem from dihydrogen monoxide through framing, authority, missing context, technology, and AI.
History is breaking news.
The Chronicle Keepers
A YA historical-fiction and time-travel mystery series about four student journalists, an impossible printing plate, and the real stories that shaped history. Book One, The Deadline Plate, sends them to 1887 New York, where Nellie Bly's landmark reporting is in danger of being erased before it can reach deadline.
The Deadline Plate is now available in paperback and Kindle.
Classroom. Culture. Curiosity.
The biography matters less than what each experience taught me about stories, audiences, trust, and the machinery behind what we believe.
Forever learning
Teaching journalism means learning in public, every year, with students who notice changes before institutions do.
Superheroes welcome
Comics, Star Wars, Disney, music, movies, television, and memes are laboratories for framing, point of view, canon, and audience expectation.
Follow the story
Once you see how stories are constructed, even a theme-park newspaper sign becomes evidence about who wants you to notice what.
Five moves before you share.
Not “believe nothing.” Not “trust me.” A repeatable way to slow down certainty and investigate what a claim has actually earned.
Different rooms. Same question.
Journalism, photography, broadcasting, teaching, technology, Disney, MTV/SonicNet, yearbook, and popular culture all kept teaching the same lesson: presentation changes meaning.
Follow the connectionsA story can be factually accurate and still produce a false understanding.
That is the intellectual path that eventually became EITYWT and the WATER Check.
Wear your curiosity.
T-shirts, mugs, and stickers for people who keep asking questions. Explore WATER designs, Chronicle Keepers merchandise, and “I survived” swag for Jourgensen alumni.
Life outside the lesson plan.
Personal essays about family, teaching, faith, and pop culture. Life Between the Lessons is where there is room for the whole story.
Read the next essay.
Read the essays on Substack or have new ones delivered by email. Free subscriptions are available.
Subscribe to Life Between the LessonsPrints from these travels are available in the Jourgensen Media shop. If these essays are worth a cup of coffee, you can leave a tip.