Students were invited by Poland’s best read quality newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza to find out whether the country is ready to host UEFA Euro football championship next year. During nine-day journeys in June they were sharing in real-time their experiences of using Polish services, travelling in the country and interacting with Polish people.

The project was called “Mission 21” and had been already recognized by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and students themselves as “one of the most exciting social-media journalism projects to date”.

George Brock, Head of Journalism at City University London, said:

“Mission 21 was an excellent example of the kind of real-time, real-life training for young journalists which rests on cooperation between a leading paper and website and a journalism school. And I don’t think that it was just City University’s students who were learning: it seems that the editors at Gazeta Wyborcza learnt a few things about social media too. These young journalists are showing how to engage audiences in ways which will help to build and sustain journalism in the future.“

21 students of 11 different nationalities had to spend nine days in Poland without any special assistance. They simply got plane tickets and the amount of Polish zlotys that British tourists usually spend there. They went to 21 largest cities chosen by a draw.

“Before the students came to Poland, they told us they expected to see a gray, depressed post-communist country, hard hit during World War II, inhabited by very conservative, Catholic people. We were so surprised listening to all these ideas. Poland has changed so much since democratic and economic reforms in 1989 and joining the EU in 2004,” said Grzegorz Piechota, Gazeta Wyborcza’s senior editor and head of public awareness & social campaigns.

Can Euro 2012 change this terribly wrong perception of Poland?

About a million football fans are expected to travel there next year. And many of them may as surprised as John Seymour, a student on a mission to Poznan, who wrote on the blog: “Call me naive but I did not expect to see shops such as River Island, H&M, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple and La Senza in Eastern Europe… Poznan appears to be a great example of Poland’s progress since the fall of communism and a city that has the infrastructure and amenities of any Western European city.”

City students found also Poland safer and less conservative than they expected. There are however some stereotypes that proved to be true.

Some non-white students and one Jewish one met with openly racist comments on the internet that made them think Poland still had a problem with xenophobia. Looking for answers in Wroclaw, black-skinned Saad Noor realized: “[Polish] racism is the result of locals having little contact with foreigners and it is more out of suspicion and ignorance than hatred.”

Exactly as feared, the students found that Poles love to complain, hate to smile and are reluctant to speak any foreign languages. Christian Jensen, who tested Gorzow, offered a rule of the thumb useful for Euro 2012 travelers: “The younger generation can speak [English], but the older generations can’t.”

After all Poland proved not that bad as seven out of 21 students decided to stay longer after the Mission 21 had been accomplished.

Grzegorz Piechota said:

“Pictures of attractions all over the country have impressed many Poles too. It seems many of us have not noticed how much our cities had improved since we joined the EU and spent billions of euro on renovations and building new attractions. It took Londoners to tell us to travel less to the Mediterranean and more around homeland.”

Gazeta Wyborcza has just announced a new supplement for Saturday titled “Poland. I like it!” fully based on recommendations by City students.

Football stadium construction sites in Warsaw, Gdansk and Wroclaw (all three are delayed) and the only stadium built on time in Poznan were also inspected. Officials of all these four Euro 2012 host cities assured the students they would be ready for the championship.

The Mission 21 was not all about testing. Journalism students did some old-fashioned investigative reporting — for example Camilla Mills put Bialystok and its mayor to shame for mistreatment of animals at the city’s zoo. Some other showed some entertainment talents — for example Petter Larsson recorded a song about Katowice and made a video clip that was broadcast by Poland’s popular public television channel TVP 2:

“Revealing experiment of use of social media”

Poles have been following the expedition with growing interest from June 6th when it had been announced to June 18th when students arrived until June 26th when most of them left. According to data from Agora, Gazeta Wyborcza’s publisher, the students’ blog at misja21.blox.pl became at that time the fourth best read on a popular Polish Blox.pl platform of 236 thousand blogs.

Despite the fact that the blog and Facebook wall page at Facebook.com/misja21 were written in English, they were read mostly by Poles and 84 per cent of readers were aged 18-34 — so difficult to reach for newspapers.

Extensive use of social media was an experiment for both Gazeta Wyborcza and City University London. All discoveries in Poland were reported and discussed with readers in real-time on Facebook and Twitter at @misja21. Later stories were reported in full and commented on the blog. Some of the students’ stories — after translation to Polish — were published in Gazeta Wyborcza on its websites and in print. Texts were enriched by pictures and videos taken by students and uploaded to the blog and YouTube channel of the Mission 21.

Grzegorz Piechota recalled: “For Gazeta it was a revealing experiment of use of social media for better reporting. Imagine the stream of raw, unedited multimedia bits published all day by 21 students, their 21 shadow journalists, some additional photo and video reporters, and hundreds of readers who got involved. Then imagine these five poor editors trying to manage assignments for all stakeholders including readers and filter from the stream what deserved to be amplified in single or all channels.”

Piechota added:

“For the first time in the history of Gazeta’s editorial projects, we have not received any single e-mail or any letter by post about Mission 21. All interaction has finally moved to social media and we the traditional media editors simply need to adapt. Real-time communication with the public becomes an integral part of our journalistic practice.”

About City University London

• City University London is an international University with a reputation for academic excellence and a central London location. It was placed in the top 5% of world universities by Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-11.
• The University leads London in education, research and enterprise for business and the professions and is ranked 10th in the UK for both the employability of its graduates (by The Times Good University Guide 2011) and graduate starting salaries (by The Sunday Times University Guide 2011).
• City is broadly-based with world leading strengths in the arts, including journalism and music; informatics; social sciences; engineering and mathematical sciences; business; law; community and health sciences.
• The University attracts over 21,000 students from around 160 countries and academic staff from around 70 countries.
• City was founded in 1894 and in 2016 will celebrate its first half century since gaining University title.

About Gazeta Wyborcza

• Gazeta Wyborcza is the best read quality daily newspaper in Poland with paid circulation of about 335 thousand copies and weekly readership of 4.3 million people (2010).
• Gazeta was founded in 1989 by a group of journalists and activists of the underground democratic opposition press as the platform for the first democratic parliamentary elections. It became the first independent newspaper in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.
• Part of the success of Gazeta is its unique formula of the national newspaper with regional pages in 21 regions of Poland.
• Gazeta.pl internet portal is an umbrella for 90+ online brands from news to social networks and advertising. Monthly Gazeta.pl reaches 11.5 million or 63% if Polish internet users (Dec. 2010).
• Gazeta is published by Agora, one of the most successful media companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Its businesses include publishing of newspapers, magazines, books and online services, running radio stations, production of TV, film and music, out-of-home advertising, and a network of cinemas.

Junior Media is an educational project targeted at schools: both students (pupils) and teachers. The goal is to show to the youngest why it is worth to read newspapers and why it is worth to have a newspaper at school. Amateur journalists writing for such newspapers will be able to learn from professionals from Polskapresse, who will help them build the pages, correct their mistakes and teach them professional journalism.

Thanks to the special online platform, creation of a newspaper is expected to be very easy. The online system will help the students create a newspaper step-by-step on a premade newspaper templates. In order to participate in the project, the school needs a computer with online access only.

The Junior Media online editorial office allows one school to create an unlimited number of newspapers which can then be printed out or read online. Beginning next year, 50 best newspapers created on the Junior Media platform, will be printed out in the printing plants – in the newspaper format and on the dedicated paper. 250 copies of those newspapers will be delivered to schools.

The schools’ participation in the project is free.

Junior Media is similar to Danish “Ekstra Bladet’s ” Redaktionen project. Forum4Editors asked Magdalena Chudzikiewicz, Polskapresse’s spokesperson, about more details of the project.

Forum4Editors: What is the planned contribution of professionals in teaching young journalists?
Magdalena Chudzikiewicz: Before the end of this year, we plan to organize workshops for editorial offices of school newspapers. The workshops will be organised in 8 cities around Poland, and will be led by professional journalists from our regional editorial offices.

Will the process of creating newspapers be 100% online or does Polskapresse expect young adepts to visit its editorial offices?
Yes, the entire process of creating newspapers will be online but every newspaper will have a chance to be printed out at school or by us as a reward in our every month competition. The pupils have been visiting our editorial offices for quite some time so far. We want to combine them with the Junior Media programme and treat them as a part of a media educational programme. This is why we are about to launch special admission forms for editorial offices’ tours directly from the site www.juniormedia.pl

What is the schools’ response you are expecting? How many schools do you expect to attract in the programme?
We will try to reach all the schools in Poland. It is hard to count their response yet. Out project is a long term one and I think we will not be able to evaluate it before next Autumn.

How many copies of the best newspapers in the project will Polskapresse print out?
At the beginning we expect to print out 250 copies monthly and deliver 50 best newspapers to schools in 250 copies each.

What about the rest of the newspapers? Will they be distributed online?
All the newspapers will be accessible online. We will leave this form of distribution to schools. They can decide themselves whether they want to keep the newspaper online, or will it be printed out and distributed among the students.

What is the cost of the project?
I am not allowed to tell

A similar project comes from the Danish “Ekstra Bladet”. What is the difference between Redaktionen and Junior Media?

We are not afraid to tell that we liked Ekstra Bladet’s project, and that it inspired us. The idea is basically the same – media education plus building the readers’ loyalty from the very beginning. The differences are based on our specifics and the construction of the project. We specialize in local media, and due to the fact we publish many regional titles, we created a new brand targetted at children – Junior Media. Through this brand we plan to build the regional brands awareness and link young people to the content created by our journalists. The school editorial office that will register on the special editorial online platform has to choose the brand that is specific for the region. Under this brand the newspaper will be created. It can also be filled with the content from our websites. Only the best newspapers will be printed out by us, as far as we are concerned Ekstra Bladet prints out all of them.

We don’t have the deep insight of the Dannish project, but we also will educate children and teenagers in terms of media. Special workshops that will start before the end of this year will help us reach this goal. Not only that – we also plan the competitions and the Summer Journalism Junior Media School for best school editorial offices in Poland.

Thank you, and good luck.

This May twenty five reporters of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s best read quality daily, got back to their schools — primary and secondary, public and private all over the country — to check how did they embrace new technologies.
Reporters had to spend there a week going to classes, doing homeworks, talking to pupils, teachers and parents. Some of them finished their education there 30 years ago. Imagine the challenge!
Readers could follow reporters’ expedition on their blog, give them tips, share experiences.
Sadly, they found that Polish schools are “museums of chalk”, as one of teachers wrote in a letter to editors.
Grzegorz Lorek, a biology teacher from a city of Leszno, claimed: “Schools pretend the Internet does not exist. Some teachers don’t have even e-mail addresses. I am also a ‘digital immigrant’ as I grew up in the world before the Internet revolution. And my pupils are ‘digital natives’. They live in a sort of an avatar. When they go to school, they get out of their avatar for a while and what do they find? Me — a teacher at the chalk board. I work in the museum of “the chalk reality”. How can I teach them to live in the new brave world?”
We believed Mr. Lorek’s testimony was so important that we quoted his letter on the front page of Gazeta when we started our week-long series called “School 2.0″. The headline read: “The end of the chalk age”.
From May 17 to 22 we published 25 articles about it in the nation-wide edition and 205 articles in 21 local editions of Gazeta. All stories, photos and videos were posted in a new section on the newspaper site.

Findings of Gazeta’s reporters embedded into schools

Over 91 per cent of pupils in Poland have a computer at home and most of them have an Internet access. But some teachers still ask kids to write — for example — a definition of a metaphor as their homework and then surprisingly get the same answer copied from Wikipedia!
Gazeta’s journalists surveyed 2,081 pupils and learned that 71 per cent used the Internet when doing their homeworks. 45 per cent admitted their homeworks are fully based on information found online!
Nobody has taught them how to use this information critically, how to evaluate and compare sources. Where were the teachers?
When reporters talked to them, they so often seemed to be helpless or overwhelmed by the speed and variety of changes in the society.
One history teacher complained: “I ask pupils what’s the source of knowledge today and the answer they give is: ‘You log in to Wikipedia and copy”. I ask who’s been at a library recently? I hear: ‘Me, I logged in to www.library.pl’.”
But is it any wrong?
Another teacher — the Polish literature specialist — cried: “Six-graders don’t remember an alphabet as they use computer dictionary tools to write. They speak abbreviations, their sentences get poorer and poorer. The language of text-messaging has entered the everyday conversation.”
She and the others didn’t know how to include new technologies and Internet tools into their practice. They didn’t know any good examples of good practices. They didn’t know if there were any teaching materials available, where to find them and how to use them.
During our research the social impact of new technologies seemed often to be out of radar of school authorities with one exception. Schools reacted quickly when noticed about pathologies like privacy breaches on the Polish Facebook, any pictures or videos showing misbehaviors etc. The problem was they did nothing to prevent them. There were no lessons on Internet safety, privacy, or copy rights! Only 28 per cent of pupils told us their teachers had given any lesson about the guidelines to use the Internet.
But there is hope. We found out that teachers — however afraid — wanted to change their practice, learn more and share with pupils.
It is a paradox — almost all Polish schools have computers but they are rarely used during lessons other than computer science. It’s one of the reasons why teachers usually tell pupils what the rainforest looks like instead of showing it to them or sharing a link to YouTube.
Another reason is that nobody really cares if teachers innovate at work. “Despite all the governmental programs and official statements being innovative does not help teachers in their careers”, claimed our leading writer on education Aleksandra Pezda. “Their main goal is to prepare kids to national exams. And these exams are still very traditional. For example teachers fight with kids using computers to prepare homeworks claiming they would have to write exams by hand! Is this really the main problem of our age?!”
All these revelations made us think how to bring a change together with teachers, parents and pupils themselves.

From School 1.0 to School 2.0

We asked numerous independent experts, non governmental organizations and companies to help us. We want to prepare over this summer and introduce this fall new teaching materials to Polish schools, train their teachers and provide them an online platform to share experiences and good practices.
It’s going to be the largest and the most expensive social campaign this year just after our “Humane healthcare” activity. We’re now securing sponsors and merit partners.
We count on participation of at least 7,000 schools that have engaged into our earlier educational campaigns called School with Class. We run them for many years together with the Center of Civic Education, a non-governmental organization.
We are going to start in September by announcing a new Codex of School 2.0, a list of issues and ideas how to include new technologies in education.

• When and how to use computers at schools and homes to help pupils succeed in education and their adult lives?
• How to use Internet tools creatively, safely and responsibly?
• How can new technologies help students to work together on their projects?
• How to improve communication between teachers, pupils and parents?
• How should they adjust lesson plans, homework tasks, exams?

The Codex will not serve as a final list of orders for schools. Its aim is rather to start internal debates at schools and then to inspire them to adopt the results of these debates.
Schools will get a set of new teaching materials for free and will be able to apply for online training programs for their teachers. The most active ones will get additional support and become Labs 2.0.
All teachers will be free to start their own projects — plan and run innovative Lessons 2.0 or other activities — and to share their experiences with others on the Internet platform. We’re going to name Teachers 2.0 — the most creative and innovative — over the school year.
The best case studies will be presented at the national conference for teachers we want to organize next June. We will call this event Festival of Schools 2.0. It will include professional discussions and presentations to young people.
Additionally, the best Polish experts will work on sample exam questions to help the authorities in opening Polish exam system to innovations. We will invite schools to participate in the trail exams. We’ve got some experiences in such trials — we organize them every year in association with Operon, a leading publisher of schoolbooks. Over 300,000 students took our trial exams in 2009.
Last but not least we will publish a guide for teachers and parents about all the Internet tools that kids have been using already and that could be applied in education also — like wikis, blogs, Twitter-like feeds, Facebook-like networks, photo and video sharing sites etc.

Why it is a newspaper that may help

We believe in building bridges across generations. We don’t build ghettos for young readers and try to engage them into the regular newspaper and our campaigns instead. It works — we are happy with one of the youngest readerships across Polish newspapers: 53 per cent of Gazeta Wyborcza’s readers are younger than 40 and almost every fifth

young Pole aged 15-29 reads Gazeta at least once a week. In 2008 the World Association of Newspapers awarded us with the title of the World Young Reader Newspaper of the Year.
Education is on our radar for many, many years. We were supporting reforms of the system in 90s and 2000s. Our campaign called “Schools with Class” is widely recognized among educators. Many teachers are our readers. As we know and trust each other, there is just a small step to do something together again.
We are not afraid of the Internet world. We have embraced it many, many years ago and today our online portal Gazeta.pl is the fourth largest website here after Google, a Polish clone of Facebook and a TV-owned portal. It attracts 11,8 mln users in a month. It’s 66% of all 17,8 mln Polish Internet users (Poland has 38 mln inhabitants in total.)
And finally, here at Gazeta we believe that our mission is broader than just delivering honest news. We initiate and support nationwide social campaigns like “Kids get home” , “Poland runs”, “Dad’s return”, “Transparent Poland”, “Let’s save Rospuda”, “Humane birth”, “Humane healthcare”, “Loose weight with us”. Readers know our campaigns bring the real change and so they are happy to get involved.

If you want to learn more about this and other social campaigns of Gazeta Wyborcza, meet me from September 29 to October 1, 2010, in Kraków at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference. I am one of the organizers as the Vice-President of INMA in Europe — Grzegorz Piechota

That morning Wroclaw, the fourth largest city in Poland, became a stronghold. Defenders were not soldiers, nor fire-fighters. They were people like us armed with their mobile phones.

• Michal: “Kozanow district is fighting. 9 lorries with soldiers, 4 diggers, hundreds of people try to make the river embankment higher.”
• Marta: “They told us to evacuate the sick and old. We are so worried and now we’ve run out of sand.”
• Pawel: “Is there anybody from Piesza street? I can’t contact my grandparents. What’s up there?”
• Kajetan: “I am back from Kozanow. Working all night. Neighbors brought us strawberries.”
• Gosia: “I can’t help you as I am in France now, but I am following you and wish good luck!”
• Kiepas: “Fog over the city. Temperature: 13 degrees. Humidity: 93 per cent. No rain at the moment.”
• Kasia: “In Kozanow water is pouring through the embankment.”
• Magda: “What’s the source of this information? Put here only checked info. Don’t repeat any media bullshit.”
• Ziomek: “Confirmed: water really broke the embankment. Kozanow in panic!”.

That morning — on May 22, 2010 – I was not there. I followed all this fight with the river on the Internet blog wroclawzwyboru.blox.pl.
Its editor, 29-year-old Pawel Andrzejczuk, a small company owner, estimated he cooperated with some 300 contributors who fed his blog with over 3000 news items and uploaded 4 GB of photos and videos.
One amateur video captured the river breaking the embankment in Kozanow district of Wroclaw. One could see the crowd running away and hear them swearing to God.

The floods and media: from 1997 to 2010

Watching streets under water I could not stop thinking about another flood that had hit the city in 1997. That time I was a young reporter at a local newsroom of my newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Our editorial office was under water as well as the offices of the other three local newspapers. In the early days of the flood I lost my car driving through the water, so I could only sail across the city to collect information.
Fixed line phones were down. Mobile phones were big like handbags and very rare. Internet was still a toy for geeks.
The flood of 2010 was so different. It affected much smaller part of Wroclaw, destroyed many less houses and brought no casualties. But it was a bigger news event, as professional journalists were joined by amateurs who dared to provide independent 24-hour live news coverage on the Internet.
Everybody’s got a mobile phone with a camera now. Becoming an “accidental reporter” is just one click away.
Pawel’s blog directly competed with all the TV news channels, radio newscasts and newspaper portals. In just 5 days it attracted 157,000 unique users in a city of 630,000 inhabitants. It’s about one third of what our established local news portal of Gazeta for Wroclaw is attracting monthly.
50 per cent of users found Pawel’s blog when googling for “flood in Wroclaw” and similar keywords. They chose a link to an amateur news site instead of official sources, or professional media.
Official sources were in disgrace as it was a mayor who kept repeating Kozanow was safe. Professional media — a bit slower than a real-time web, more confident of the official version, cautious of the unconfirmed amateurs’ accounts — turned down some audiences.
An amateur news feed had also its flaws. Reading it I had to cut through the jungle of revealing witness-accounts and simple rumors, but at the same time I felt as a reader that I participated in something big. Such a rare feeling in our individualistic world of “Me”.
Pawel might not be a professional news editor, but over last 5 years he has built online a strong community: over 560 websites link to his blog, his Facebook profile got more than 2,600 fans and become almost as popular as our local Gazeta’s one. It all paid off during the flood.
Finally, Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media” manifesto reached its point in my part of the world.

So, how does it feel to be challenged by own readers?

Not so bad, as we have brought it in a way upon ourselves.
My newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza was founded in 1989 by anti-communist opposition to bring independent journalism to the country and support underground Solidarity’s bid for the first partly free elections in Poland.
Today Gazeta is the best read quality newspaper here with an average paid circulation of 347,000 and 4,2 mln readers reached in total every week in print. Our online portal Gazeta.pl, the fourth largest website here after Google, a Polish clone of Facebook and a TV-owned portal, attracts 11,8 mln users in a month. It’s 66% of all 17,8 mln Polish Internet users (Poland has 38 mln inhabitants in total.)
Gazeta’s publisher, Agora, is one of the most successful media groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Its offer includes magazines, books, record and movie productions, cinemas, radio stations and out-of-home advertising.
21 years later Gazeta still believes its mission is broader than just delivering honest news. Since its launch it has been a voice of “modern Poland” — supported democratic reforms, joining NATO and the European Union. It has been helping to build an open society by providing platforms for debates and inspiring people concerned with a common good.

Embracing new media

We have embraced new media as they make our efforts easier and more effective.
Our online boards (Forum.Gazeta.pl) let people discuss over 5,900 different topics ranging from politics to education and health-care to hobbies and over years our users shared there over 113 mln posts and 2 mln photos.
Our blogging platform (Blox.pl) became the biggest in Poland as it hosts over 184,000 individual blogs. Pawel’s blog on the flood in Wroclaw is one of them. When water broke embankments of that city, it became the best read blog on the platform. So in fact we have been sharing all his traffic successes.
We’ve been even ready to share some revenues! Pawel’s blog is a member of our online advertising network (AdTaily.com). This network helps to turn visitors of blogs and niche sites into advertisers and provides funding to independent voices in the society. Until today it has attracted in Poland over 13,000 amateur and professional online publishers.
(Recently, AdTaily.com was named by CNBC as one of the Europe’s 25 most creative companies. If you want to learn more, please come and listen to their story at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference in Kraków, Poland, on September 29-October 1, 2010.)

This post is a chapter of an article I wrote for the upcoming report on the future of journalism to be published by the International Press Institute in September 2010.

Forum4Editors: What is “Redaktionen” (please describe)? How long is it on the market?

Louise Abildgaard Grøn: Danish tabloid “Ekstra Bladet” created “Redaktionen” (The Newsdesk), an internet-based editorial platform where schools (students in school, age between 13 and 17 years) produce their own newspaper. Today most schools produce newspapers as part of the education — using a variety of standard graphical software. With this revolutionizing platform from Ekstra Bladet, the students follow a process and produce their own newspaper with online support and help from editors, journalists, photographers, layout etc. The aim is to get the student to understand both how to write and edit a newspaper but also understand how photos and layout works. 2–3 days after deadline “Ekstra Bladet” delivers 1,000 colour prints of the paper — directly at the school. This award-winning campaign has built intense loyalty with young people. The project is two years old and was launched october 2007.

How many newspapers have been produced since the start of Redaktionen? How many copies have been distributed?

Since launch, October 2007, more than 400.000 papers has been distributed.

Did Redaktionen help Ekstra Bladet with its recognition from the readers?  Has it influenced the sales level of Ekstra Bladet?

„Redaktionen” is a product of a long term strategy to involve youngsters in our brand. The point is to get them involved in our brand much before they actually become potential customers. Therefore we do not expect the launch of ‘Redaktionen’ to have direct influnece on our sales just yet. This is a long term investment to build strong relations to our brand.  But we have seen an increased traffic on ekstrabladet.dk in this target group.

Do you have any other ideas for establishing the connection with young readers?

We have two other succesful products for our future and young reader:
1. The Front Page (FP) can be seen close related to “Redaktionen”. FP is an internet-based interactive game where students in high schools produce their own Front Page through a series of dilemmas. It can be accessed anywhere and is free of charge. During FP students realistically experience the necessary role that Ekstra Bladet plays in a modern democracy. In FP students are exposed to some of the same dilemmas, time constraints, adrenaline rushes and the ups and downs experienced by journalists, photographers and editors during a normal (or maybe an exceptionally exciting) working day. The FP is a case-based interactive dilemma game in which the students deal with four different fictional cases all based on real life cases from Ekstra Bladet’s front page. This gives FP its authenticity by transforming something abstract into something concrete which the students can relate to. This form of storytelling involves experience and scenario based learning to reinforce the learning process.
2. The worlds largest football-tournament for schools is the biggest in the whole world. The tournament was established in 1961 by Ekstra Bladet. It’s a big success with 1,000 (out of 1,500 total High Schools in Denmark) participating schools and more than 1,700 school teams. Finals are played in the Danish national stadium – Parken – and are broadcasted live on national TV.

Redaktionen is a great learning tool about journalism and newspaper production. Forgive me this strange question, but what’s really a point to teach readers how the newspaper is being made? Nobody who wants to drive a car needs to learn how the car is being produced.

I think there is a small misunderstanding here. ‘Redaktionen’ teaches students about why we have newspapers, journalism and secondly how to create a newspaper. On the other hand we believe that if you understand the newspaper, what it can do for the society and how it’s been made students may be much more likely to develop a life long tradition using newspapers. You can say that we intend to trigger an interest for reading newspapers, that the students otherwise would not have developed. Also this gives us a chance to interact with students in a way, much more relevant  to them. The target group for “Redaktionen” are students (pupils) in the age 14 to 17 years. That’s why they need both to learn how to drive a car and also need to learn how it is produced.

Thank you very much for this interview.