Media literacy

We believe in media literate audience in Europe and worldwide. One of our goals is to promote critical thinking and education in media field, not only and necessarily media makers and journalists, but also media consumers – broad public. Media literacy is important in sustaining democracy by knowing which information sources to trust and which media are trustworthy. It is important to recognize and see through propaganda and sometimes “read between the lines”. Therefore, we stand for educated, literate and critical audience and in that way we are contributing to improvement of our profession.

Many false reports or propaganda are spread and concern about media bias, incorrect reports, disinformation and lack of on-line fact-checking is growing.

Professional media makers need up to date competences in order to keep up with those developments. The news have been changing, not only channels (devices), but also their form – like twitter length news – and journalism has to transform accordingly. At the same time, citizen journalism and media freedoms must be preserved – free of hate speech, censorship and tabloidisation. Development of media literacy in the digital media matters not only to media makers but for societies in general.

Project “Making the Twitter Length News: media literacy in the digital media” is aiming to:

– increase capacities of young media makers, journalists, bloggers and communication professionals in working with the digital/social media, in their reporting on political, social and economical topics and ways they send messages;

– promote journalistic ethic in digital/social media;

– raise public awareness about specifics and challenges of the news communicated by the digital/social media.

#DMLeyp will foster discussion on following issues:

– media freedom: being accurate, fast and uncensored;

– power of social media (countries in transition, spilling online revolutions to offline world, viral vs.true stories..);

– social media audiences, tools for verification and fact-checking, opinion makers and role of the media;

– digital media security issues vs. freedom of expression;

– internet, European legislation(s), self-regulation…. and more!