Some of the world’s best youth editors and journalists were gathered in Bali, Indonesia from 24 to 26 November for the 2014 World Young Reader Summit, and a couple of us from R.AGE were there to learn some tricks of the trade.

In fact, the recurring advice from Aralynne McMane, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers’ (Wan-Ifra, the organisers of the summit) executive director of youth engagement and news literacy, throughout the four-day summit was that we should be “stealing” each other’s ideas. Well, if she said so …

Most of the journalists at the event had done some exceptional work in creating news content for young people, such as the team from Young Post, the youth section of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, which shared its experiences on its very successful live social media coverage on location at the on-going Hong Kong student protests.

Then there was Anders Kongstad, 24, who started – of all things – a SnapChat news service. The service, SnapKanalen, became so popular among young people in Kongstad’s native Denmark that he was able to start recruiting “SnapChat reporters” – young Danes who would volunteer to send news reports to SnapKanalen. Some of the volunteers were even sending news from overseas!

To get all these brilliant journalistic minds working together to come up with new ideas, a series of talks, panel discussions and brainstorming sessions were held during the summit.
On top of that, there was also the awards ceremony for the World Young Reader Prize. R.AGE was announced as a winner in the Enduring Excellence category a couple of months ago, but it was on this trip that we finally got our hands on the trophy.

On a winning streak: R.AGE editor Ian Yee receiving R.AGE’s second World Young Reader Prize in Bali, Indonesia.

As winners, we were asked to share how we’ve been using digital news media to empower young Malaysians by giving them a voice, particularly through initiatives, like our R.AGE Against Bullying campaign, #AllMalaysianWomen anti-sexism campaign and the BRATs teen journalist programme.

The award was our second World Young Reader Prize, after our first win in the Editorial category in 2012.

Hopefully, it won’t be our last.

About Ian Yee

Ian is the editor of R.AGE. He hates writing about himself.

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