The “Center of Youth Engagement Excellence” designation honors newspaper associations that have a deep, long-term commitment and devote resources to news literacy and youth engagement.
"Supporting youth engagement is a national interest as it is proven to serve the critical thinking skills of young people as well as helping to build knowledge," said Tibor Kovacs, the President of the Hungarian association.
"With the assistance of magazines and newspapers, we connect the everyday world to classrooms, building a bridge between theory and practice," he said. "However, the biggest winner is Hungarian society, with a well-informed young generation becoming responsible, successful and beneficial members of the nation. With newspapers, we can clearly show the importance of press freedom in the creation of developed democracies."
The Hungarian Publishers Association received the designation for its “HÍD” (“BRIDGE - Newspaper to students”) program, which has involved more than 204,000 students who were given 2.5 million newspapers over the past 10 years.
The Association has developed several different initiatives, including an accredited educational programme covering all high school grades and even post-graduation. Courses can be applied as independent extracurricular subjects or integrated curriculum, either in class or as afternoon courses.
The SÉTA program (WALK - Press and learning), run by regional publishers, gives students the opportunity to visit editorial departments and printing houses and have the possibility of publishing their articles during the program.
The Hungarian Publishers' Association becomes the 15th national newspaper or news media association to be designated a Center of Youth Engagement Excellence. The others include: the Newspaper Association of America, Danske Medier in Denmark, the Finnish Newspapers Association, Mediebedriftenes Landsforening in Norway, NDP Nieuwsmedia in the Netherlands, SPQR, SPQN and ARPEJ in France, Associacão Nacional de Jornais in Brazil, Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger in Germany, Nihon Shinbun Kyokai in Japan, Andiarios in Colombia, Les Journaux Francophone Belges, and the Korean Association of Newspapers.
The induction took place during the 2015 WAN-IFRA Youth Engagement and News Literacy Committee Meeting last week in Budapest, hosted and supported by the Hungarian Publishers' Association.
The professional focus of the Budapest meeting was the latest challenges related to digital news content and sharing best practises related to news in education, media literacy and a better understanding of media.
For more on WAN-IFRA’s programmes for youth engagement and news literacy, click here.
