Junior Report, five years creating informed and critical youth

"Sustainable clothing, another way of understanding fashion", reads the headline.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
03 June 2022 Friday 05:58
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Junior Report, five years creating informed and critical youth

"Sustainable clothing, another way of understanding fashion", reads the headline. And then: "The textile industry, one of the most polluting in the world, is looking for alternatives to save resources and be more respectful of the environment." The issue is addressed today by the Junior Report digital header on the occasion of World Environment Day, which is celebrated on June 5. It has been developed by the team of journalists, teachers, designers and infographics who work to create informed and critically-minded young people in the classroom and outside of them. They have just turned 5 years old and are celebrating it by intensifying efforts to connect young people with the world around them through information and media.

"We are militant in trying to get schools to introduce newspaper reading in their classrooms. That young people acquire the habit of getting information through conventional newspapers because today we are more connected than ever, but there are also fewer filters than ever" , regrets Francesc Castanyer, founder-editor of Blue Glove Media, the company that five years ago created the Junior Report header, a digital newspaper for young people between 12 and 18 years old.

It is distributed in Spanish through the Society section of lavanguardia.com, but in its Catalan version it functions as an independent digital newspaper. "We claim to be a reliable and rigorous source of information" - comments the director of the newspaper, Alba Fernández Candial-. "That young people are aware that the information they consume even has consequences for themselves."

The disconnection between young people and current affairs is what motivated this team to travel abroad and see first-hand the models that other media such as the BBC or The New York Times offered their young people. "All these models helped us to create our own, a current newspaper for students that was also a work tool in schools," says Castanyer.

Today they already have interesting figures: 1.6 million monthly clicks and a reading ratio of between 8 and 11 minutes. Interestingly, 75% of the audience comes through Latin American countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile or Argentina. "We work hard on the news and flee from clickbait," they point out from the Editorial Board, which meets every day to choose a piece of news, contextualize it and provide it with material so that it can be worked on later in class.

Global or state issues of global impact are discussed and the hardest and softest news is played with: the Texas massacre, the rise in the price of gas or oil, the war in Ukraine, the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, but also the cake thrown against the Mona Lisa, Primavera Sound or the boom in women's soccer. "We try to explain the role of the media for the democratic balance of society," says Castanyer. Hence the importance of treating the issues from the description, never from the opinion: "What matters is that they create their own opinion about it," she adds. "It's a difficult task, but our background as journalists helps us approach issues objectively, looking for other angles," insists Fernández Candial.

The director recalls the October 1 referendum in Catalonia as one of the most difficult issues to deal with because of everything that was happening on the street, the intensity with which young people were experiencing it and the interest it could have for someone who read the news in Venezuela, for example. "In the end we chose to talk about the most recent referendums in the world, including ours. We are very clear that our position cannot in any way be reflected in the news."

Junior Report is a social value proposition, but it also makes business sense. In this line, the team carries out digital media education workshops in schools and has opened a school magazine project so that schools can create their own communication medium. At the moment, they work with 80 schools in different Spanish cities. "They learn to document themselves, to elaborate information, to discover the environment and to dominate different formats such as text, podcast, audiovisual...".

Climate change and gender violence are some of the issues that are most insistently discussed today, for obvious reasons. "We are very concerned, because the reports that reach us tell us that the youngest girls are the ones who suffer the most gender-based violence," says the director sadly.

Today there are already some 5,000 student editors willing to explain their most immediate reality to the rest, climate change and gender violence being some of the issues that are most insistently dealt with. As they would say in the past, stop machines!