Voicing young people’s perspectives: Media influencing as a form of collaboration between youth organisations and the professional media

Maarit Jaakkola provides an example of “media influencing”, a form of youth participation and engagement, through the Finnish Youth Voice News Centre (YVNC). The intention of the project, started in 2006, is to engage young people in news production and thereby make them, and their perspectives on news, visible in mainstream media content. The distinguishing feature of the project’s pedagogy is to offer the young content providers a “third space”, a physical and cultural place that respects their autonomy and integrity, and cross boundaries between different age groups. This is a practice that could be applied to other neglected or vulnerable groups, Jaakkola argues. (Andersson, Dalquist & Ohlsson, introduction to the anthology, 12)

"The YVNC newsroom presents a form of media education and youth work that combines elements of citizen or democracy education and media literacy education with a focus on media influencing through journalistic production. In a way, it exploits the wide audience for print and broadcast culture to arrive at a win-win situation: A group of young people are empowered, and the media reach out to audiences with issues that would not otherwise be covered.... [Y]oung people are able to produce content with equal influence to that of adult professionals in media.... This practice could also be applied to other neglected or vulnerable societal groups, to enable messages to reach audiences who would otherwise not come into contact with them." (Author, 75)