“Winning this prestigious prize is a huge endorsement of our hard work.”
The Student View has won The News/Media Literacy Award category of the 2019 Global Youth & News Media Prize.
The Student View was founded in 2016 by English and Politics teacher Solomon Elliott from London who wanted his teenage pupils to learn about disinformation by first becoming investigative journalists themselves.
Journalists from publications such as the Financial Times coach the students and the charity has launched 72 pop-up newsrooms in schools throughout the country, mostly serving students from low-income backgrounds.
Teenagers complete a 12-hour media literacy course and collaborate on
investigations with local newspapers such as the Oldham Times. The Student View now advises similar efforts in Mongolia (Remo) and Bulgaria (The Media Bootcamp).
The Student View was able to scale beyond London in January 2019 after receiving funding and wider support from Google.org and Google News Initiative.
Projects from Kenya and the USA received silver awards, with a new Finnish initiative receiving a special commendation.
“We have known for some time that learning how to do journalism is a great place to start in news/media literacy work, along with close contact with working journalists,” said Dr. Aralynn McMane, a director of the prize, “and this initiative takes that work to a fabulous new level.”
Solomon Elliott, The Student View’s founder said, “Winning this prestigious prize is a huge endorsement of our hard work. We believe the fastest way to create a world of critical media consumers and creators is to train young people as journalists. We are thrilled our approach has been so well received by leading experts from across the globe.”
Kenya’s Top Story reality television show features an investigative reporting competition for journalism students and has a documented impact on the media literacy of its audience. The US-based Checkology virtual news literacy classroom was developed by The News Literacy Project and has research-based results and users all over the world.
The brand new Troll Factory from the Finnish Broadcasting Company received a Special Commendation. This new educational game combines real-life social media examples with a gamified storytelling experience and attracted 21 000 unique visitors in its first month of existence.
The international jury for the News/Media Literacy award featured experts in that field from Belgium, Canada, France, Panama, Nigeria, South Africa and the United States. The Prize is directed by Dr. McMane and Jo Weir and honours organizations that innovate as they strengthen engagement between news media and young people while reinforcing the role of journalism in society.
The News/Media Award category recognizes initiatives that effectively educate about journalism and news media in ways that help young audiences navigate all kinds of content as they develop news habits and knowledge key to developing active citizenship.
The top awards in the News/Media Literacy and Journalism categories will be presented in Paris in November at NewsXchange. This annual meeting gathers more than 600 news executives, journalists, bloggers and start-up entrepreneurs from all around the world to share, learn and cross-pollinate ideas with an array of experts, scientists, artists and thought leaders. A Planet Award was presented in May at the Eurasian Media Forum, the main partner for that category.
Support for the prize comes from News-Decoder, the European Journalism Centre and the Google News Initiative. Partners had no role in judging initiatives to which they give support.