The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an American nonpartisan national education nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., that provides resources for educators, students, and the general public to help them learn to identify credible information, recognize misinformation and disinformation, and determine what they can trust, share, and act on. It was founded in 2008 by Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau.

As an academic discipline, news literacy is widely considered a subset of media literacy and information literacy. The American Society of News Editors' Youth Journalism Initiative defines news literacy as "the acquisition of 21st-century, critical-thinking skills for analyzing and judging the reliability of news and information, differentiating among facts, opinions and assertions in the media we consume, create and distribute. It can be taught most effectively in cross-curricular, inquiry-based formats at all grade levels. It is a necessary component for literacy in contemporary society.”

In 2006, Miller was invited to tell 175 sixth-grade students at his daughter's middle school in Bethesda, Maryland, what he did as a journalist and why it was important. When the students responded with 175 handwritten thank-you notes, he began to think about the impact that many journalists could have if they shared their expertise and experience in classrooms across the country.

The idea seemed particularly meaningful as more and more Americans, young and old, were turning to social media as a news source, and as it was becoming increasingly challenging to distinguish fact-based news from spin, misinformation and raw information. Two years later, Miller left the Times and founded NLP.

Its lessons and materials, initially aimed at educators and students in middle school and high school, "are apolitical, created with input from real journalists," Mark Sullivan and Tim Bajarin of Fast Company wrote in 2018. "It teaches students how to recognize the earmarks of quality journalism and credible information, and how to know if articles are accurate and appropriately sourced. It teaches kids to categorize information, make and critique news judgments, detect and dissect viral rumors, interpret and apply the First Amendment, and recognize confirmation bias."

In September 2020, NLP announced that it was making its programs for schools available at no charge and was expanding its work to include resources for the general public. Three years later, NLP returned to its roots to concentrate on K-12 education programming; in August 2024, the organization made a "strategic pivot" that "tightens our focus on bringing systemic change to public education at a national scale" — including support for legislation in all 50 states that would require news literacy classes in schools.

Miller retired as CEO on June 30, 2022. He was succeeded by Charles Salter, NLP's president and chief operating officer.

Members of NLP's board of directors have backgrounds in journalism, communications, education, technology, and philanthropy. The board chair is Karen Wickre, a former communications executive at Google and Twitter; Walt Mossberg, former technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of the tech website Recode, is vice chair. Among the current board members are Tucker Eskew, a political and communications strategist who was deputy assistant to the President for media affairs and global communications under President George W. Bush; philanthropist Eva Haller; Abby Phillip, the anchor of CNN's NewsNight with Abby Phillip; and Liz Ramos, a U.S. history and government teacher at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California.