Major newspapers and even local ones (if they still exist) have been so dumbed down in the past few decades. I would estimate that many are now written to target a less-than-high-school literacy level. Worse, news often seems to be written to elicit outrage or fear (probably because "engagement").

I remember in my school days each day one student was responsible for summarising headlines from the newspapers in the school assembly to encourage us to read newspapers.

Ha. Not knowing any better, I took a class in high school that turned out to be actually reading the daily newspaper and writing a one-page report _every single day_ about international issues that literally never impacted our day-to-day lives in rural Podunk, USA.

It was the most boring and soul-crushing class I've ever taken in my life. After that remote learning course about Quality Assurance in college, of course.

In Europe, The Economist and The Guardian are about the only serious in-depth sources left, at least for those that can read English.

We need more things like Ground news.

We're either propagandized by reading the news or watching it on TV OR we're holed up in a confirmation biased world by social media (which is also propagandized).

'Local newspapers' in my area are majority advertisement for local businesses or coupons. Like the content of reading a newspaper could be condensed to maybe 2 pages, if that. The first page is like what volunteers or schools are doing. While another half a page contains maybe a township schedule or something similar. I don't think there is much content to 'read' that would change much to be honest.

At work I have access to all newspapers big and small, I use to read all of them but I haven't touched one in a decade. Not one article that isn't infantile nonsense or outright propaganda of a quality that falls appart in the first sentence.

Since I cannot find any mention of this in the French press and after asking a few friends who have children in high school (hopefully this is lycée, a tad too late to push people to reding) -- it is very likely not a nationwide experiment at all

A friend of mine briefly managed a "celebrities and ovni" kind of newspaper. His first decision was to distribute papers to generic people asking them to highlight the words they did not understand. He then proceeded to having these words added to the spellcheckers so that they are flagged as incorrect.

His time was a nice success for the newspaper and a sad addition to the average stupidity of the world.

I used to get the newspaper everyday before highschool. I mostly got it for sports, comics and puzzles, but many days I ended up reading it cover to cover. Unfortunately, that paper folded while I was in college. Hopefully, this is a good program for highschoolers and newspapers both...

How about making teenagers seek out independent media? We've seen the results of people being raised reading MSM newspapers and it's not pretty. Propaganda packaged as "serious news", is some of the most dangerous media that exists.

I don't understand. The way I read the text one group was simply given a free subscription no? They weren't made to read anything?

Again, what does this have to do with hacker news. This isn't reddit.

"A Nationwide Experiment in Mainstream Media Indoctrination in French High Schools"

Fixed it for you.