How to win young readers?
September 9, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
“We do not believe in stereotypes that today’s young people do not read and are not interested in the world. And we prove it,” Ewa Tomaszewicz of Gazeta Wyborcza tells the full story of the World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year.
Poland’s Gazeta has won the annual World Young Reader Prize contest organized by the World Association of Newspapers: the top award and two jury commendations.
“This is the first time one single newspaper has taken home so many awards,” says Aralynn McMane, director of Young Readership Development at the WAN.
The international judges add: “Gazeta Wyborcza has made it clear that it is a leader for not only Europe, but for the world in engaging young people effectively on multiple platforms in the important issues of the day.”
Why do young people choose to read Gazeta?
Gazeta Wyborcza and education
We have not started to engage young readers since last year. We have done it for many years.
We have cared about quality of education at Polish schools and we have supported reforms of our school system. We have invited teachers and students to participate in the reforms with our social campaigns like “School with Class” and “Students with Class”.
We always look for new and innovative ways to report about schools and students’ issues. This year we wanted to check if it is true that learning at schools is easier now than it used be when we all were children. Many parents think like this.
We have sent two adult reporters – Marek Was and Marek Sterlingow – to spend a week at school in a class with 14-years-olds. They had to do homeworks, write exams, answer to teachers’ questions in front of their class.
This brave venture of two guys in their mid-30s and mid-40s started a series of advice articles called “Rehearsals for parents”.
“We believed that before we could teach parents how to help their kids at school, we had had to recall how it really was when we were kids,” says Marek Sterlingow. “We revealed that children nowadays have as many duties at school as we had in the past. In my opinion the school has not changed a lot since I were a student myself.”
For years, Gazeta helps parents and students to prepare themselves to the exams. We publish sample tests and we provide answers to the real exams on a day after children take them at schools, so they can check how they have performed. We also run numerous educational web services for students and parents, for example UczymySie.pl (“We teach and learn”) where some parents advice the others about homeworks.
Last autumn we went even farther – we organized “real” exams at schools.
There is a tradition at Polish secondary schools that they run trial exams several months before the real ones just to make students familiar with requirements and let them check themselves their knowledge and skills.
Unfortunately, last year the Polish Central Examination Board dropped these trial exams due to lack of money and organizational problems. We got many calls and letters from disappointed teachers, parents and students.
“So when a publishing house Operon, whom we often cooperate with, came out with an idea to organize trial exams by ourselves, we felt we had to support our readers,” says Beata Jaworowska, deputy promotions manager of Gazeta.
Gazeta and Operon prepared questions, printed and distributed over one million exam sheets that resembled the real ones.
80 per cent schools in Poland entered this venture and 360 thousand students attended trial exams.
Gazeta Wyborcza and the open society
Last year the World Association of Newspapers awarded our campaign to save a river Rospuda.
You can watch a story of this protest presented by Gazeta’s Grzegorz Piechota at the WAN congress in Gothenburg, Sweden:
This year the association has awarded another protest that engaged many young readers in Poland – it was against Chinese policy in Tibet.
Gazeta invited readers to show their solidarity with Tibetans. We devoted the front and back page of our Monday feature supplement Duzy Format (“Large Format”) to print the flag of Tibet. Readers could use this flag when demonstrating their support for Tibetans or their disappointment with Chinese policies there.
Readers documented their actions by themselves – they were taking pictures and uploading them to Gazeta’s website. Within a week we got over 1000 photos and printed some of them in the newspaper.
This campaign has got an additional jury commendation at this year’s World Young Reader Prize competition. The judges comment: “It is very hard to get local involvement for an international issue. Few newspapers showed anywhere near the commitment for the attack on human rights in Tibet, especially as early and effectively.”
To watch a gallery of readers’ photos and learn more details about this campaign, go to another forum4editors.com story: “Readers show their solidarity with Tibetans.”
Gazeta Wyborcza and sport
During this year’s UEFA European Football Championship we organized our own Mini-Euro for kids in a city of Gdansk.
Football became hot in Poland this season as Polish team qualified to this championship for the first time in history.
“We simply responded to a growing interest in football and we convinced a city council to support our activities,” explains Jaroslaw Kopec who is responsible for promotions in our Gdansk local office.
Gazeta invited its youngest readers – 11-years old and younger – to form teams of 3 to 5 members and apply together to our Mini-Euro. Each team took the colours of one of national football teams playing in the real European Championship.
The final round of Mini-Euro was played on 8th, 12th and 16th of June, when in Austria the Polish national team was fighting (and failing) to leave the group. Unlike their older collegues, young footballers representing Poland in Mini-Euro were able to crush “Germans” 14:7, they won with „Croatia” 8:5 and lost only with “Austria” 3:6.
“Unlike in the real championship ‘Austria’ made it to the finals and beated ‘The Netherlands’ in great style,” recalls Jaroslaw Kopec.
The WAN jury has given his commendation to this campaign: “The paper turned a defeat into something to make young readers proud.”
Gazeta’s offer to young readers
All these awarded campaigns and editorial series are only small parts of Gazeta’s printed offer targeted to young generation.
Young people take part in debates organized by the newspaper – for example about migration, rats’ race at work, the quality of Polish universities.
They also like Gazeta’s supplements like the Friday one on entertainment called Co Jest Grane (“What’s up”), Monday recruitment one Gazeta Praca (“Newspaper on Jobs”), Gazeta Sport (on sports) and our features magazine Duzy Format (“Large Format”).
To learn more about Gazeta’s supplements, visit our official website for advertisers (in English).
(Article contributed by Ewa Tomaszewicz, head of educational content at Gazeta Wyborcza and its online services)
Tagged: campaign, Case studies, competition, Gazeta, interaction, internet, WAN, young readers
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Dear Madame/Sir,
For World Young Readers Prize you’ve awarded with, we appreciate and express our high congratualtion.
As an active NIE promte here in Taiwan, we are interested in reporting your article, namely HOW TO WIN YOUNG READERS? written by Ewa Tomaszewicz. May we here request to have a contribution of the relevant PHOTOS inside the article. We hope to get these photos in good high resolution for re-production in our newspaper to announce. It will be our pleasure to provide you with copies of our annoucement in Chinese version later on when we publish it.
Your timely support is highly expected.
With our best regards
Gary Yeh
reporter/educator NIE
Mandarin Daily News
@ Gary. Thank you very much for your congratulations and the interest in Gazeta’s activities. We will be happy to provide you information and illustrations you need. I will contact you shortly by e-mail.
Grzegorz Piechota, editor of forum4editors.com and at Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza
[...] do they win young readers? Read an article written by Ewa Tomaszewicz, head of educational content at Gazeta Wyborcza and its online services. [...]