This was the decade when the school use of newspapers became a nationally supported program. Keeping pace with educational trends that were shifting from studying the past to studying the present, the newspaper was used to teach current events. In 1954, C. K. Jefferson, a circulation executive of The Des Moines Register and officer of the International Circulation Managers Association (ICMA), persuaded the Des Moines school system to survey 5,500 secondary school students to find out how they spent their leisure time. He was upset to learn that 30 to 40 percent of them did no reading outside the classroom, and those who did spent only one-third as much time reading as they spent watching television.

Jefferson approached the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), which had already published a pamphlet series on “How to Use Daily Newspapers,” and the National Council of Teachers of English. Both organizations passed resolutions supporting research on the use of newspapers in schools. In 1956, representatives of 10 major professional organizations in education and the newspaper business met at the Drake Hotel in Chicago to plan the research. It was this research in 1957 that led to the establishment of a national “Newspaper in the Classroom” program, first sponsored by ICMA and later taken over by the American Newspaper Publishers Association, which became the Newspaper Association of America in 1992. Two of the people who directed the research – Merrill Hartshorn, executive director of NCSS and John Haefner, professor of social studies education at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and former president of NCSS – subsequently devoted more than three decades to guiding the national program.

The first manifestation of the national program was the development of three annual graduate credit summer workshops that trained up to 100 teachers each year in the classroom use of newspapers.