Cristiane Parente, executive director for newspapers in education for the Brazilian Newspaper Association (ANJ) told participants how to set up a School Newspaper Prize for Press Freedom.

The prize, created by WAN-IFRA for use within a country or region, honors the school newspaper team and advisor who do the best job of using WAN-IFRA 3 May Press Freedom Day materials and their own creativity in a school newspaper to effectively teach fellow students about that topic.

"Young people should develop the materials to discuss and raise the flag of liberty with us," she says.

As part of its Newspapers in Education Development Project, supported by Norske Skog, WAN-IFRA has made available several other toolkits for this purpose (in English and Spanish):

-- How to do a “Liberty. Picture it!” mobile phone photojournalism contest or project.

-- How to help teachers by printing some exercises. These stand-alone activities can be handouts given out during a class visit or treated as advertisements within a paper. The materials include a full-page set of multiple exercises or separate sheets encouraging students to design a front page, plan a campaign or explore the notion of press freedom in film.

-- How to do a press freedom design-an-advertisement contest or project, which provides a brief for students to make a public service advertisement for press freedom day, plus background about how to make an advertisement and, especially, a public service advertisement.

The details about these actions are  available at http://tinyurl.com/6jfhj5r and the 3 May materials will be available starting 1 April at www.worldpressfreedomday.org
Participants also heard about key lessons to be learned form last year’s winners of World Young Reader Prizes and about how to join that competition for 2011.

“Size of circulation and staff have no correlation to excellence in this domain,” said Aralynn McMane, WAN-IFRA executive director of young readership development. “We’ve had winners from newspapers that had a staff of two and a circulation of 5000 copies once a week. The keys are a creative attitude, an authentic interest in the young and a presence at the important “firsts” in their lives.”

Details here: www.wan-ifra.org/worldyoungreaderprize