About NIE

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Use the links below to order newspapers online for your classroom(s)

•  CLICK HERE to Order sponsored papers for the classroom.

•  CLICK HERE to place a general order.

Newspaper in Education (NIE) is a long-standing program utilized by schools worldwide to bring the excitement of timely "real-world" learning tools to classroom activities. Newspapers used in the classroom have been proven to help engage students, stimulate creativity, enhance reading skills, and improve academic performance by 10% over schools that do not offer NIE programs. Our focus is to encourage students to read the paper, learn about their community and their world, and live a more successful life by being informed citizens.

The Omaha World-Herald provides 75% of the classroom program costs as well as 100% of the curriculum development, mailing costs, delivery costs, and printing costs. Local businesses and foundations through sponsorships provide the remaining costs. Some schools also elect to support the program when their budgets allow.

Our NIE sponsorship program requires that teachers order a minimum of 10 papers on any day or day(s) of the week that they choose.

For orders of 9 or fewer copies, the schools do need to provide the funding or find their own sponsors.

What is NIE and where did it come from?
Lots of people are still asking the question: Where did NIE originate? NIE as we know it today began at The New York Times in the 1930s, when social studies teachers in the New York City schools asked the newspaper to arrange for bundles to be delivered at schools to use in current events activities. (Content of textbooks is already five years old on the day they are delivered to the schools.)

These insightful teachers received the support of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, grandparent of the current publisher, and the first student subscriptions began to appear in schools.

Over the decades the concept spread like wildfire among newspapers across the country. The program was called Newspaper in the Classroom for a long time. Then our Canadian friends convinced us in the late 1970s that we ought to be saying Newspaper in Education since copies of newspapers were clearly being used in educational settings such as prisons, adult literacy centers and hospital-based learning programs -- far beyond the traditional classroom.

Yes, NIE has been around a long time, and if we look at the "incidental use" of content from newspapers in schools, the idea goes back even farther, perhaps to the publication of the first English-language newspapers in London, England, in 1702. (We in the United States eagerly await historical research from international NIE specialists documenting the use of text from newspapers in schools earlier than on the North American continent!)

Early use of newspapers in the schools
The earliest documentation acknowledging the idea of using newspapers in U.S. classrooms is an article published June 8, 1795, in the Portland (Maine) Eastern Herald. Here is the excerpt from that article:
"Much has been said and written on the utility of newspapers; but one principal advantage which might be derived from these publications has been neglected; we mean that of reading them in schools, and by the children in families. Try it for one session - do you wish your child to improve in reading solely, give him a newspaper - it furnishes a variety, some parts of which must infallibly touch his fancy. Do you wish to instruct him in geography, nothing will so indelibly fix the relative situation of different places, as the stories and events published in the papers. In time, do you wish to have him acquainted with the manners of the country or city, the mode of doing business, public or private; or do you wish him to have a smattering of every kind of science useful and amusing, give him a newspaper - newspapers are plenty and cheap - the cheapest book that can be bought, and the more you buy the better for your children, because every part furnishes valuable information." (Quoted in Editor & Publisher, 1984.)

The Newspaper in Education program is a cooperative effort of newspapers and thousands of schools in the United States, Canada and other nations where the newspaper is used as a tool of instruction. Publishers provide copies of their newspapers to schools, sponsor teacher education programs, offer instructional resource materials and generally help schools develop newspaper use for student learning.

Goals for NIE programs
Using newspapers to strengthen instruction at all levels is the goal of Newspaper in Education. NIE programs: