EVENTS: Teenage News Takeover

News publishers around the world are being invited to give over control of the day's news offer to teenagers for at least one day during November 2014.

The idea of this project is to encourage news companies around the world to hand over some editorial and creative control to young people sometime during the month of November, even if only for one edition.

The World Teenage News Takeover is a hands-on way to teach today’s youth about both the business and art of the news production process, while simultaneously serving as a community engagement tool and acting as still another occasion to teach newsroom staff about youth. Doing it in many countries within the same month makes the message global: that news publishers actively engage the young in ways that enhance news literacy and that make news staff really listen to the youth voice.

Outcomes from the initiative will be revealed in front of an audience at a major WAN-IFRA industry event in 2015.

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PRINT / TRAINING: UNICEF trains journalists (NIGERIA)

Thanks to a workshop, many Nigerian journalists can now practice better. The workshop, which held in Kano, helped them to make better use of data obtained in the line of duty.

They confessed they had been shying away from data-driven story-writing. Reason: they lacked the skills to humanise data, a situation Dr. Ayobami Ojebode of the University of Ibadan described in his paper as “numerophobia” –the phobia for numbers or figures.

He said: “one of our big goals in the storytelling process is to humanise the statistics. It’s hard for people to care about numbers, especially large numbers”.

Ojebode quoted Westbrook (2010) to define data-driven news reporting as “journalism in its truest essence: uncovering what the public do not have enough time to do themselves, interrogating it, and making sense of it before sharing it with the audience”.

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OPPORTUNITIES: The Guardian offers workshop for young writers

Aspiring young journalists who are residents in the U.K. can apply for a writing workshop.

The Young Writers' Workshop, sponsored by the Guardian, is open to writers between the ages of 16 and 22. The aim of the program is to help participants pitch articles to the paper, create a link between new writers and Guardian editors and encourage diversity in the newsroom.

The twenty selected participants will attend two workshops, on September 14 and September 21. The workshops will be run by editors from the Guardian’s G2, sport, culture and comments sections.

Applicants from all minority, disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

For more information, click here.

NEWS / PRINT / TRAINING: IGNOU, UNICEF sensitise scribes on infant deaths

New Delhi: The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) along with UNICEF sensitised media personnel on the high infant mortality and low immunisation levels in Madhya Pradesh, a statement said Thursday.

"A 20-member team comprising national, state and district level media visited Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh and observed the low rate of routine immunisation and high infant mortality in the state," a varsity official said.

The journalists visited the state-of-the-art special care newborn units, set-up by the National Rural Health Mision (NRHM) and UNICEF, as well as the cold chain vaccine storage units in the district.

According to IGNOU, the visit was part of second phase of its partnership with UNICEF launched a month ago to address the issue.

The journalists got a first-hand experience about the micro-planning involved in the handling of cold chain equipment that maintains vaccines at right temperatures.

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AWARDS: Unicef NZ Writing Award Goes To Fairfax Journalist

Wellington, 4 February 2011. -- A journalist with the Waikato Times newspaper has scooped up a UNICEF NZ award for her story about the impact of malaria in the developing world.

Nicola Brennan's story, titled "A few dollars can save lives" won the 2010 UNICEF NZ Journalism Award. The award encouraged NZ journalists to report on issues facing children in developing countries and UNICEF's role in helping those children. This includes the impact of emergencies and disasters on children, as well as day-to-day issues facing children in the developing world.

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NEWS / PROJECTS: Innovative newspaper projects for youth to be awarded

Innovative newspaper projects for youth to be awarded

Posted on: 16/04/2009 Children, Print Journalism, Publications, Specialized Reporting Deadline: 15/06/2009 Region: Worldwide

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) invites entries for the 2009 World Young Reader Prizes, which award newspapers that have devised innovative projects or activities for young readers (under age 25). Deadline: June 15.

Projects submitted to the Young World Leader Prize may be in one the following categories: Editorial - a newspaper content strategy; Making the News - Activity that gives young people the chance to experience professional newspaper practice; Newspapers in Education - Use of the newspaper as a teaching tool; Public Service - Public service project in areas such as press freedom, literacy, youth civic involvement, etc.; Brand - Other projects that improve a newspaper brand's relationship with youth.

The jury will take into consideration the contribution the program has made to the newspaper business. This could be in terms of revenue generation, circulation, readership growth, or brand awareness. Each winner will receive EU€1,000 (US$1,318).

Entries must be based on a single project or a series of related activities conducted in the 24 months before June 15. Each participant must send in send in a PowerPoint presentation, limited to no more than 15 megabytes on a CD or 5 megabytes via email, of their project in English.

For more information, go to http://www.wan-press.org/nie/wyrp.php.

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