What should perfect youth media be?
I dare you to enter the zone was a series of workshops and debates devoted to the issue of youth media and was organised as a part of Youth Media Zone project (23-25 of April 2013). Participants were 80 young people from around Poland interested in media-related topics. The seminar consisted of two parts – workshops, which took place in the European Meeting Centre in Nasutów near Lublin, and a one-day conference, which was held in Lublin.
Topics which were covered during the workshops included: the ethics of journalism, news production, photography, self-presentation, online journalism, reporting and voice production. The trainers were young people, mostly students, working professionally as journalists and reporters in students’media and having some experience in that field. The workshops were followed by a debate, which took place on the last day of the seminar. The participants discussed their views on the shape of perfect youth media.
The outcome of the discussion was the following: youth media should be apolitical, created by young people. Media which are not visually attractive, are not appealing for young people. Moreover, youth media should operate online on web 2.0 basis, which means that the content should be generated by users themselves and at the same time supervised and proofread by professional journalists, and by means of that young people may acquire practical journalistic skills.
Media should also be more informative. There should be more information on jobs, cultural events, workshops for young people. Radio plug-ins should be embedded in browsers to form a habit of listening to the radio that young people are lacking in nowadays.
After the debate, the participants visited Radio Centrum – Maria Curie-Skłodowska University campus radio – and got acquainted with the way this radio station operates.
The conference with experts in the field of media was the ultimate element of the seminar. It revolved around the use of media in teaching. It turned out that despite the ubiquity of brand-new equipment, teachers do not make a clever use of technology during their lessons.
Therefore, there is a need to organise media workshops during which students will learn how to use media consciously. The second issue which was raised concerned the ways in which media should be used during the lesson so that they do facilitate the process of learning. The conclusion that was reached was that media themselves should not be a base. They should constitute a tool by means of which knowledge is transferred. They should be used wisely to draw students’ attention and spark their interests in a given subject.
The project Youth Media Zone was organized by the European Meeting Centre – Nowy Staw Foundation.
