The My DreamInterview Festival

WORLD NEWSLITERACY INITIATIVE

www.wan-ifra.org/youngreaders

Youth become reporters to tell inspiring success stories

Contact: Dr. Aralynn McMane, Executive Director, Youth Engagement & News LiteracyEmail: aralynn.mcmane@wan-ifra.org. Website: www.wan-ifra.org/youngreader

Team: 7th Grade - School 1252 Prefectura Naval Argentina- Villa Constitucion - Santa Fe Province – Argentina Students: Wanda Aguilar, Guadalupe López, Tomás Cassetta, and Danisa Herrera. Teacher: Graciela Leiva. With La Nación, Argentina

Team: 7th Grade, School Club De Leones N°1158 , Villa Constitucion, Santa Fe Province, Argentina. Stu-dents: Alexis Juan Domingo Dominguez, Juan Cruz Krausse, Santos Marzano, Alan Joel Moreyra, Renzo Lautaro Pavón, and Franco Tomás Sosa. Teacher: Alicia Jausoro. With La Nación, Argentina

JuryCommendation: Interview with Irene Villa, who lost her legs at age 12 when terrorists bombed her family car and later be-came an author, screen-writer and national symbol for forgiveness.

Team: Pedro de Atarrabia Junior High School – Year 8. Students: Ana Gil Espartero, Maite Sánchez Gale-ra, Rosa Cruz Chueca, Raquel Aristu Marañón, Nidia Pino Duarte and Itziar Saenz Bretón. Teacher: Jose Javier Baile. With Diario de Navarra, Spain.

Top Award: Interview with Estela de Car-lotto, the mother of a young woman assassinated during Argentina’s dicta-torship and head of “The Grandmo-thers of Plaza de Mayo”

Top Award: Interview with Susana Trimarco, whose Foundation of Maria of the Angels has succeeded in res-cuing more than 900 Argentine women from sexual slavery.

THE 2012 EDITIONMy Dream InterviewA global youth reporterfestival of success stories

The My Dream Interview Festival is part of the

news literacy initiative by the World Association of

Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and its

partners to promote an interest in and an understan-

ding of news among the young.

In brief, we help news-

papers work with teachers

so students can learn about

journalistic interviews, then

work in groups to create

interview questions for the important person of their

choice who succeeded through hard work.

The newspaper selects the best set of questions,

helps make the interview happen and publishes the

result. Each participating newspaper or newspaper

association could then enter a limited number of

interviews in a global competition..

The first, pilot edition of the festival in 2012 was

conducted in Spanish and English and attracted more

than 2000 students, ages 11- to 15-years-old, from

eight countries in Africa, South America, Asia and

Europe. It was supported by the Fundación Acindar

of Argentina as part of its 50th anniversary celebra-

tion.

Global awards for the top nterviews were pre-

sented at the opening of the World Publishing Expo

in Frankfurt, where students and teachers repre-

senting the winning teams also did a Youth Reporter

Study tour that included schools, newspapers and

the Anne Frank Centre. In additon, local ceremonies

were held in Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia.

Support the adventure! We seek partners

for a 2013 edition so more newspapers can help

more children have an unforgettable taste

of real reporting in English, Spanish,

Portuguese, French, German and Arabic.

If you are interested in helping, please

contact aralynn.mcmane@wan-ifra.org

Bolivia, Brazil teams also wonThe Fundacion para el Periodismo of Bolivia persuaded the country’s 12 leading newspapers of all political pesuasions to participate, allowing teams of children to interview a wide range of people, including the country’s president. The effort was supported by the European Journalism Centre as part of its five-year Press Freedom 2.0 initiative funded by the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.

I

by seven students, pictured above with their teacher, of Escola Municipal De Ensino Fundamental E Médio Edson Queiroz, Maracanaú-CE. Australia, Colombia, The Philip-pines, and Uganda also participated in the festival.

An international juryWAN-IFRA invited four experts in journalistic interviewing from around the world to act as volunteer judges (all from countries where no newspaper was participating in the festival): Duan Stokes, publishing director of Hot Press (Ireland), regularly named Ireland’s Magazine of the Year and known for in-depth interviews with musicians, actors, artists, writers and politicians; François Dufour, a leading journalistic figure in France as a reporter, professor, observer of the news media practice and the founder of four dailies for children; Vivien Horler, a South African journalist who has interviewed hundreds of news figures in a career that began at the Cape Argus in 1973. and Uli Karg, editorial director for The Interview People, which agreed to sell the winning stories and send all proceeds to the winning schools.

A committed supporter in 2012Fundación Acindar, the oldest corporate foundation of Argentina, decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary in a way that was loyal to its mission of investing in the education of new generations by suporting WAN-IFRA’s first “My Dream Interview Festival.”We are very enthu-siastic about our sponsorship of ‘My Dream Interview’, since it is a contest which reflects and highlights the same values that Fundación Acindar has always pursued: the importance of succeeding in life throughout hard and consistent work, searching for excellence rather than just ephemeral accomplishments,“ commented Arturo Acevedo, president of the foundation, which is the Ar-gentina branch of the ArcelorMittal Foundation.

The teacher said: This contest has been perfect.They´ve learnt

more about newspapers and journalism, and they´ve got the

chance to know someone really special. [It] gave my students

the opportunity to work in something big (at least that´s how

they tell me they feel).“ A juror said: The interview made me

feel humble.“

The teacher said: It was a very interesting project because it

allowed students to work on content from the curriculum that

we have to teach, in a more creative way. The students learned

about these subjects and they did it with a great pleasure and

fun. A juror said: The story of the ‚Grandmothers‘ is relatively

well known, but this piece gave me a far greater understan-

ding... perfectly handled by the interviewers.

The teacher said: They learned skills that can be applied to

other areas and that they will use not only this year but the

next one as well. To learn about interviews is a very useful

tool. A juror said: Shocking, moving, fascinating - a great

interview .... Extremely difficult subject matter dealt with sen-

sitively and in detail. Genuinely moving and well told

In Brazil, Diario do Nordeste won a jury commendation for the interview of wife abuse activist Maria da Penha

No matter what platform we in newspapering use

or business model we invent, we must meaningfully

connect to youth, their parents and their teachers in

order to create a literate, civic-minded new generati-

on of readers all over the globe. If not, the rest won‘t

really matter. Since 1992, the World Association of

Newspapers (WAN-IFRA) has made this a core acti-

vity as part of our overall work to assure the survival

of a free press. These actions, now under our World

News Literacy Initiative, include:

-- Training thousands of teachers in NIE, the use

of newspapers in education as a supplemental

classroom text, and creating the resources to sup-

port this work. This activity not only introduces the

press at a crucial age but also, according to several

studies, increases academic achievement and contri-

butes strongly to the development of civic values.

-- Searching out and spreading the

word about other effective practi-

ce in newspaper engagement of

the young on all platforms. For

example, our annual World Young

Reader Prize honors excellence in a

wide variety of approaches. In 2013, we will invite

companies and foundations to join us in this effort

by supporting individual prize categories

For more about young reader actions and resources:www.wan-ifra.org/youngreadersaralynn.mcmane@wan-ifra.org

Helping newspapers engage the young: why & howWhat we‘ve been doing lately...

Internet in the Family – We give any newspaper the materials necessary to create a guide for families to help their children go online smartly and safely. This guide offers extensive potential for digital

tie-ins and local sponsorship and puts the newspaper in its rightful position as a community partner in media literacy. We hope to find a partner to help us create a similar guide focusing on mobile telephones.News[papers] in education (NIE) for Ireland and Botswana – The newest projects are in Ireland, which had its first Press Week in September, and in Bots-wana, where a first group of teachers will be trained in November. We hope to find a partner to help update our guides to incorporate digital platforms and approaches.

3 May Press Freedom Day Poster Project - We think newspapers can do a great deal with little effort to help youth learn about the importance and fragility of press freedom. In this new project, newspapers would work with school stu-dents – even one class – who produce

press freedom posters. Newspaper Involvement would range from simple coverage to online voting for the best student poster. We seek a partner to give this project the widest possible impact and visibility worldwide.Youth Journalism Toolkit - We help newspapers

teach youth about journalism through an unforgettable experience in newsgathering on all platforms. We seek support to help us expand this effort to provide an easy-to-access online bank of

strategies, tutorials and partnership advice.