We are a global collective of organizations and initiatives that give adolescents a chance both to do real journalism and to explore the role of journalism in a democracy. Founded in 2025, we are part of the French nonprofit Global Youth & News Media.
FOUNDING MEMBErS
(We welcome more)
OBJECTIVES
Help the leaders of organizations in which teenagers (ages 13 to 19) do real journalism to serve their constituencies even better through:
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exchange of ideas about good practice
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explorations of common issues
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joint actions in journalism and education (example jointly supporting the events like World News Day, and World Press Freedom Day
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common research projects and assessment of relevant research, starting with creating a common battery of questions on impact of a first journalistic coaching experience
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a common core set of basic editorial standards
WHAT WE'VE BEEN DOING LATELY
HELP WORLD NEWS DAY
As our first joint activity, the teenage leadership in our member organizations will work to enhance the messaging for World News Day 2026, an initiative led by the World Editors Forum, the Canadian Journalism Foundation, Project Kontinuum and the International Fund for Public Interest Media.
SO IS IT WORKING ?
We have begun work toward establishing a common set of questions usable in all countries to help assess the impact of a teenager's first journalistic coaching experience on four dimensions: journalistic skills, media literacy, life skills and civic participation. We welcome partners in this quest.
MORE ABOUT OUR FOUNDING MEMBERS
WE WELCOME MORE OF YOU!
News Decoder (France) - Founded in 2015, this combination nonprofit news service and education alliance works to inform, connect and empower young people to be engaged citizens and changemakers locally, nationally and globally.
YOCee (India) - Each year since 2006, twenty-five teenagers at "Youth Of Chennai, energetic and enthusiastic" learn how to be journalists and then do stories for cyberspace about their neighborhoods and school campuses. About their work.
The Fourth Academy (Malaysia) - In a difficult environment, The Fourth, a small investigative journalism team, has created an educational programme, The Fourth Academy, for the young that focuses on teaching how to be impactful storytellers and on the threats to journalism specifically faced in Southeast Asia. Bonus : their excellent video about the state of press freedom in Southeast Asia.
Mobile Stories (Sweden) Since 2015, Mobile Stories has educated more than 13000 secondary school students in media and information literacy and improved their skills as producers of journalism in the digital media landscape. It offers a journalism production and publishing tool that is now available in English, Swedish, Finnish and Romanian.
PBS News Student Reporting Labs (USA) Since 2009, PBS News Student Reporting Labs (SRL) has supported broadcast and journalism training programs in thousands of secondary schools serving more than 125,000 students since its start. The program connects teens with over 40 public television stations in the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and local news organizations all over the country to bring youth-produced stories to local and national audiences. It was awarded a 2025 special Global Youth & News Media Prize for Outstanding Journalistic Achievement for its resilience in the face of defunding by the U.S. government.
Press Pass NYC (USA) provides under-resourced schools in New York City with the free faculty training, student programs, and the fundamental support necessary to start a sustainable school newspaper program. The goal is to see student-led news publications in every public school in the city so students can ask questions, seek answers and sharpen their critical thinking, teamwork and leadership skills while learning the value of journalism by doing.
Časoris (Slovenia) teaches a dozen teenagers how to write for children with publication in its online news service that brings news created with care to children in a program that began in 2022. Časoris will do a special project in 2026 to train 30 teenagers in video production. In recent years, three of its reporter team have gone on to journalism school. That team won a 2025 Global Youth & News Media Prize for Journalism based on its reporting collaboration with students in a rural Slovenian school.
Founded in 2020, Salon5 (Germany) is CORRECTIV's youth editorial team, teaching young people the fundamentals of journalism and providing input for their topics. Young people learn everything about research, news, podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Each day, the reporting team produces at least one podcast episode and one social media post. Here’s a 2025 story about their work.
HOW AND WHY WE EXIST
This initiative emerged from five previous Global Youth & News Media activities:
1 ✅ From our founding, we have promoted exploring media literacy through a journalistic prism, especially through intergenerational approaches. The relevant case here in cooperation with NewsBrands Ireland had teenagers help children navigate content using journalism as a framework and also help them learn about journalism itself. Deatails about that example from Ireland.
2 ✅ Under the name World Teenage Reporting Project and starting in 2020, we spotlighted student news media solutions in reporting about the COVID-19 pandemic and then about champions of climate and of tolerance.
3 ✅ In 2023, we and our main media partner News Decoder transformed the climate champions profiles concept into a global challenge as part of a European Commission co-funded project.
4 ✅ In 2024 we organized a similar group, Children’s News Europe, to help its members help each other to do an even better job at delivering quality journalism to children in effective and appropriate ways. Members hold monthly briefings to share strategies, serve as experts on international panels, engage in collective advocacy and contribute to a members-only newsletter. Next comes working toward a mutual research, social media or editorial effort.
5 ✅ Also in 2024, we took our first steps to explore research, both existing and models for new inquiry, about the impact on teenagers of journalistic coaching. This work continues, and we hope one outcome will be a set of assessment questions that can offer international comparisons on three dimensions: media literacy, life skills and knowledge and attitudes about journalism. In late 2025, we began discussions with researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen about a possible joint project to address how journalism and specifically journalism projects in schools can contribute to boosting media and digital literacy and therefore ultimately to a strengthened democratic society.
Global Youth & News Media has recently undertaken other related actions:
✅ In early 2025, we contributed our expertise at a workshop as part of Europe’s Youth Community Journalism Initiative, a project from Media Diversity Institute Global.
✅ At a Council of Europe conference on digital citizenship late 2025, we explained several ways journalism and media literacy could reinforce one another, including by giving the young a chance to do journalism themselves.