Youth Making News - East and South-east Asia

The key strategy underlying this project was partnership between media professionals and young people. One team from each of the countries - China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam - worked together for one month. The IPS correspondent and his or her intern decided what issue they wanted to focus on, gathered data and other information about it, and conducted interviews with children, youth, and adults in capitals and up-country areas. The interns and correspondents then split up to write - from their own particular viewpoints - about the subjects they had covered together. This process was designed to teach interns the craft of interviewing and news feature writing, while also opening the media professionals' eyes to which issues are most salient to young people (as well as what youth have to say about those issues).

The result was a package of 14 news features - 7 written by the correspondents and 7 by the interns. Four of the sets of stories focus on the subject of education. The titles of the interns' essays in this section are: "Academic War Waged with Sweat, Tears", "Reforms Made by Adults, Forced on Children", "How Can We Study if Our Stomachs are Empty?", and "Teachers Must Listen to Their Students". Other stories focus on the continuing effect of Agent Orange on children in Vietnam, the daily struggle faced by street children in Indonesia, and the use of illegal drugs by young people in Malaysia.

One organiser observes that "the articles written by the interns tend to provide more space for the individual voices of the children and young people who were interviewed. It also appears...that working side-by-side with the interns influenced at least some of the correspondents, a couple of whom based their articles largely on interviews with children and young people."

These stories are published in the book Voices & Viewpoints: When Youth Make News. In addition, IPS sent the features out to its member news organisations worldwide in a special issue of its news bulletin, and they have since been published by many newspapers across the region and around the world.

Youth, Media.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, society is legally bound to protect the rights of all children to freely express themselves and to have their opinions heard and taken into account. Organisers believe that Youth Making News is a step in that direction.