My birthday is a chance to survey the state of the world. So much news is full of despair, yet I feel mostly upbeat about progress that’s been made. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses marchers during his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln...
A News Decoder partner has awarded top prizes to news organizations in five countries for innovative reporting on COVID-19 for kids. News organizations in Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Singapore and the United States have won top global reporting prizes for their...
After more than a year of COVID-19 reporting, it can be hard to find a fresh perspective on the pandemic, especially for children. But the gold-medal winners of the Global Youth and News Media Prize for pandemic reporting did just that. In an interview with the prize’s director, Aralynn McMane, News Decoder Board member Nolwazi Mjwara of UNESCO learns more about the innovative strategies taken by the winning news organizations to engage children in the storytelling process and support their mental health. Winning strategies included creating interactive games, dispatching youth correspondents to cover the pandemic and hosting a virtual art exhibition.
Exercise: How might you adopt some of these reporting practices in your own classrooms? Have your students create a game for kids to learn about issues in the news in a fun, positive way.
Lucy Jaffee interviewed a top expert to get a jump on the mainstream press in a landmark free-speech case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Lucy Jaffee Eight months before the U.S. Supreme Court took up a free-speech case covered by the world’s largest news...
They’ve worked with News Decoder for a year. Now students at a school in Romania have launched a magazine — a first in their city. The cover of the second edition of “Transylvania Insights” Inspired by their work with News Decoder, students at...
Ioan Pristavu and Octavian-Anton Ghisa, students at Transylvania College in Romania, launched a school magazine that offers a platform for fellow students to examine meaty issues ranging from the impact of COVID-19 on stock markets to racism in the UK’s royal family. Their initiative illustrates the impact that News Decoder seeks to have on students at our partner schools, who work with our experienced correspondents on the world’s most pressing issues.
Exercise: Ask your students to list issues they would want to explore in a school magazine and how they would report on them.
Journalists are under threat around the world. What to do? Take out a subscription to defend press freedom and democracy, one expert suggests. Robert Mahoney of the Committee to Protect Journalists has an easy idea for how anybody can support freedom of the press and...