SACRAMENTO - McClatchy announced today that three newsrooms will join an innovative initiative to strengthen news literacy, credibility and public trust. The Telegraph, in Macon, Georgia, and The Modesto Bee, in central valley California, will join The Kansas City Star as part of News Co/Lab, a collaborative project developed by Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and supported by the Facebook Journalism Project and the News Integrity Initiative.

The three local newsrooms will launch a variety of experiments to improve the public's ability to understand how news works, build public trust in reporting, increase transparency in how news is produced, improve community engagement with newsrooms and gather feedback. The Cronkite School will track the success of these steps and share best practices and models that work.

"There's vital work and fresh experiments to be done in delivering news the public can trust in a digital market," said Tim Grieve, vice president for news at McClatchy. "These three newsrooms will be excellent partners, representing every part of the country, various size staffs and very different communities.''

Facebook Journalism Project's launch funding is an outgrowth of the "News Literacy Working Group" that convened last March at the Cronkite School. The gathering included experts from around the world who sought innovative approaches to fighting misinformation.

The concept that emerged was the collaborative effort that will be based at Arizona State University, under the direction of two Cronkite School professors, journalist and author Dan Gillmor and Eric Newton, the school's innovation chief.