A global competition has found that collaborations between news organizations and young people can benefit both.
A bank of press microphones including ones that say youth voice and teen press. (Illustration by News Decoder)
Each year, Global Youth & News Media recognizes news organizations that are innovating in ways that include or help young readers and young journalists.
The France-based nonprofit, founded in 2018, seeks to reinforce connections between young people and news media.
This year, it held a global competition to find projects that could show how young people are helping news organizations survive in a world where too many of them are shutting down.
“I was looking at who was helping local news for a different project and noticed that nearly every journalism-related NGO I knew was doing something to help local news survive,” said Aralynn McMane, executive director at Global Youth & News Media. “And new nonprofits were emerging only for that purpose.”
The problem, though, was that she didn’t see much sharing of that knowledge. So one of the aims of the competition was to create cross-pollination — highlight projects that could be replicated by other organizations elsewhere and provide a forum for the sharing of lessons learned.
“This was a particularly satisfying competition for us because we found so many great win-win cases of meaningful youth-local news collaborations from all over the world with lessons for newsrooms most anywhere,” McMane said.
Can we fertilize the news deserts?
News Decoder is deeply concerned about the emergence of “news deserts”: localities that no longer have any news outlets as profit-driven corporate owners pull the plug on local newspapers.
A study in 2023 found that more news outlets in the UK were closing than were being launched. In Canada, between 2008 and 1 April 2025, more than 500 local news outlets closed in some 370 communities across the country, according to the Local News Map crowd-sourcing data initiative. Meanwhile, a report from the Brookings Institution found that in the United States in 2023, some 2.5 local news outlets folded every week.
That’s why I was honored to serve as one of 26 judges from 17 countries in the competition. While the entries taken as a whole gave me reason to hope, the winners left me inspired.
The competition found dozens of collaborations across six continents. They served to remind us of the vital public service mission local news organizations perform when they have the resources to do so.
Consider The Westsider in Melbourne, Australia. The staff there recognized the need for voters to be informed about the candidates in local elections and how they stand on important local issues. But to chase down dozens of candidates takes staffing that The Westsider doesn’t have. So with a small grant from a local journalism organization, the paper recruited 72 students from RMIT University to chase down every candidate running for a local office and ask them a series of questions. From that funding the paper produced a non-partisan voter’s guide.
Youth can tell important local stories.
Another standout was Phralipen of Croatia, who collaborated with Youth Roma Congress to produce stories about the Roma community through reporting, multilingual content and participatory journalism.
Then there was the Contra Costa Youth Journalism program in Northern California, a collaboration between the Contra Costa County Office of Education and Bay City News/Local News Matters, a news organization based in Berkeley, California. The program recruits and trains young people from underserved communities to be journalists and has published more than 70 stories from these areas as a result.
Katherine Rowlands, the founder and publisher of Bay City News and Local News Matters, said programs that bring young people into journalism are important.
“It is critical to train and inspire the next generation of journalists so we create a pipeline of future reporters to inform, question and make sense of the world,” Rowlands said. “It is also really important for us to include these younger voices in the journalism we do now so that we more accurately reflect our communities and bring their issues to the forefront.”
From Pakistan to Botswana, Bolivia to Tanzania, the competition identified news organizations finding ways to bring young people into their newsrooms to ensure that what young people do, and the issues that are important to them, are not left out of local news coverage. In the process, they are finding that for organizations that are short-staffed and short of funds, young people are a key resource that has been long overlooked.
The entries were graded on the impact on the local community and transferability — whether the project could easily be replicated by other news organizations in other places.
One thing we’ve learned at News Decoder — and which the results of this competition clearly showed — is that young people are eager to have their voices heard and see journalism as an effective way to do that.
News organizations can benefit from their passion and energy and also from the perspectives they bring.
The full list of winners
GOLD AWARD (most transferable, clearest on impact)
- The Westsider with RMIT University (Australia)
- Stamp Media (Belgium)
- Phralipen and the local Roma community (Croatia)
- The Greenline (Canada)
- Časoris and Črni Vrh primary school (Slovenia)
- Landshuter Zeitung/Mediengruppe Attenkofer podcast mies keck (Germany)
- Bay City News Foundation with Contra Costa Youth Journalism (United States)
- The Spotlight News with The University at Albany (United States)
SILVER AWARD (transferability and clarity of impact)
- Casa de Nadie (Bolivia)
- Nyugat.hu (Hungary)
- Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation (Nigeria)
- Univerzitetski Odjek (Serbia)
- Orkonerei FM Radio (Tanzania)
- The Jersey Bee (United States)
COMMUNITY AWARD (potential for community impact)
- Daily News (Botswana)
- Thinking Abyss (Greece)
- Kashmir Times (Kashmir)
- Risala Today (Pakistan)
- SF Channel Bitegeere (Uganda)
Full list of winners available on the Global Youth & News Media website.
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.