A WAN-IFRA YOUTH ENGAGEMENT & NEWS LITERACY ENCOUNTER

This event gathered the 2014 winners of the World Young Reader Prize, pictured above, past champions of youth engagement and news literacy and other smart people, in Indonesia for three days (24 to 26 November) of design thinking to
explore what we must do next to assure literate, civic-minded and savvy new generations for news.

Check out some of what they did via Twitter:  #WYRS2014.

The session explored the full range of how we can best engage the youth audience in ways that make sense for the survival of a free press. These include basic news literacy, the best new kinds of "firsts" we should provide, the most promising kinds of new digitally-based (especially mobile) and face-to-face participation and the smartest ways to pay for it all.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL VIDEO

We also awarded the 2014 World Young Reader Prizes and heard the details of the 21 new cases those winning entries provide from all over the world: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Netherlands, SIngapore, South Africa, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. In addition, participants took home the full story of each winning case. (Click on the icon at left to learn more about this year's winners.)

The catch?

FIRST: Participants had to come as a two-person team that included a veteran of youth engagement actions and a younger colleague who they thought could help move to the next phase. The team had to commit to going back home with a do-able new action you can do at your level almost immediately.

SECOND: Registration was on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority to past winners and WAN-IFRA members and was only for news publisher staff. Participants covered their own travel and lodging.

SUMMIT UPDATE 

News for youth on mobile – We’ve known for a very long time that cellphones are “the” platform for youth (since our 2003 youth engagment summit in Finland, actually), but there has been little news industry success in getting the news out a mobile format that truly appeals. Anders Kongstad, founder of SnapKanalen in Denmark and part of WAN-IFRA’s Media Innovation Hub, told us about the hows and whys of his own initiative and also about other variations around the world of doing news within social media such as SnapChat.  Get an idea about that quest from our weblog interview HERE.

News from Youth on the Front Line  – Young Post staff from this WAN-IFRA award-winning youth edition of the South China Morning Post explained why their coverage of the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong made them THE place to go for credible reporting. The Daily Beast in New York called them for contacts, a key radio station in Portugal asked for an interview, BBC followed their tweets, and Occupy Central named them as a the most solid news source. Check out their coverage yourself  HERE.

The News Literacy Opportunity – This key subset of media literacy offers a perfect fit in the evolution of classic NIE (newspapers in education) programmes to incorporate digital content and also assure an understanding of the practice of quality journalism and its place in a democracy, and of the importance and fragility of press freedom. World Young Reader Prize champion and jury member Lynne Cahill of the West Australian gave some specifics about how to get started in both content and the finances to pay for it.

Great Ideas from Indonesia – These included the latest from Indonesia's stellar array of World Young Reader Prize winners, details a new guide for teachers based on a previous Prize-winning initiative from Straits Times of Singapore, and some straight talk for publishers from passionate youth who want to help media help strengthen their democracy.

CLICK HERE to find out about the guide and how more 250 teachers got a close up and personal introduction during a day-long workshop the day after the summit. 

The Other Great Ideas – Veteran youth engagement consultant and World Young Reader Prize juror Gerard van der Weijen gave us his take on the latest great ideas from all over the world and from all parts of a newspaper operation (marketing, advertising, distribution, education).

The Ideathon: The next moves

Chris SopherChris Sopher led 13 news companies to develop a new initiative to start when they got ome. The possibilities included how to monetize a mobile news channel without annoying users, how to give commuters a cheap and easy preview of the day's print ediiton and how to make an interactive comic strip even better. 

WITH THANKS TO OUR HOSTS

AND TO OUR OTHER LOCAL PARTNERS

AND TO SUPPORTERS OF THE WORLD YOUNG READER PRIZE