Business News
Young Reader Initiatives Span the Globe
Tuesday 26. October 2010 - French newspapers are getting a lot of attention for the countrys successful programme of giving free subscriptions to young people to encourage newspaper reading. But France isnt the only place where young reader initiatives are having an impact.
From a youth newspaper that is changing life in a Somali refugee camp to a programme that helps Swedish youngsters navigate through the multimedia landscape, projects around the globe are refuting the assumption that young people dont read newspapers.
Young reader development experts gathered in Paris recently to report on their programmes and exchange ideas, as part of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Young Reader Development Working Group.
The projects include:
More than 300,000 requests were received for 200,000 free newspaper subscriptions for 18- to 24-year olds in a project underwritten by the French government and French newspapers last year. The government announced last week it would continue the programme again this year, offering 220,000 subscriptions. (More on the programme here).
Young people in a Somali refugee camp in Kenya created a newspaper that reports on conditions in the camp under a Norwegian-supported project that is teaching them basic journalism, ethics, freedom of expression, democracy and more.
“If you have them tell their own stories, not only for themselves but for the environment around them, they get a purpose, they feel they have achieved something,” said Paal Stensaas, a communication consultant involved in the project for 15- to 25-year olds in the camp, where some of them were born.
In Sweden, one of the most wired countries in the world, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers Association, has launched “Media Compass” to help young people make informed media choices.
“Young people consume seven hours of media a day, pretty much as much hours as young people sleep. They spend so much time with media but they have little understanding of how it works,” said Lena Vitorin of the Swedish association.
Among other things, the program hosted a meeting on freedom of speech that attracted 700 high school students and sold out within two hours of being announced – “People take freedom of speech for granted, its not something on the top of mind for young people,” Ms Vitorin said. “We wanted to get young people to take a stand on what freedom of speech and freedom of the press means to them (watch the WAN-IFRA press freedom film that was used in the meeting to introduce the subject: www.wan-ifra.org/pressfreedom-movie).
In the United States, where newspapers in education still serves 10 million students in schools, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation is reaching out to a new generation of teachers who grew up in the digital age. The Foundation is conducting focus groups with teachers to assess how they think about and use NIE materials.
“In the past we never reached out directly to teachers. We worked with newspapers and they engaged with the teachers,” said Margaret Vassilikos of the NAA Foundation. “We started to step beyond this, and this is the first time in my memory were going to work directly with teachers to see what we can do to help the situation.”
In Belgium, an “Open My Newspaper” programme by the French wing of the Belgian Newspaper Association now makes newspapers and related lessons available to students in 73 percent of French-language secondary schools.
The Hungarian Newspaper Association gives children the opportunity to interview a personal national hero through a “You Are The One For Me” contest. A similar contest is conducted in Chile.
In Brazil, schoolchildren created a special newspaper about press freedom for their classmates and won WAN-IFRAs first World School Newspaper Press Freedom Prize. The Brazilian Newspaper Association, ANJ, promoted the effort through placemats that are used at conferences and elsewhere – the first in a series highlighting young reader actions, said Cristiane Parente of ANJ.
The WAN-IFRA Young Reader Development Working Group comprises NIE and young reader development experts from national newspaper associations and others. More on what WAN-IFRA does for young reader development can be found at: