Young journalists team up in Barents
“Young journalists are the future of cross border communication in the North. We feel it is important to give them a possibility to network and learn about new media”, says Virpi Komulainen, project coordinator of the Barents Mediasphere.
About 30 young journalists and media students from Barents Region meet for the very first time in Kirkenes. During the four days, they will for instance learn how to make attracting photo stories and how to edit videos by using smartphones.
The program is organized by the Barents Mediasphere project and the main purpose of the event is to gather young Barents people whootherwise would never meet.
Participants represent regional or local media organizations – print, radio, tv, internet – or work as freelancers or are media students. Participants come from different places of Northern Finland, Norway and Russia.
“I came here because this sounded like fun. It has been interesting to learn using for example new applications on mobile phone to edit short video clips for web”, says Maret Biret Sara Oskal from University of Tromso, Campus Finnmark, Alta. “And it might come handy in the future to know Barents media people”, adds her schoolmate Emil Kruke.
During the weekend media youth will join the annual conference of the journalist network Barents Press International. It is expected that about 140 participants from Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia arrive to Kirkenes for the conference.
The organizer of the meeting of young Barents journalists is the Barents Mediasphere project which is financed from the Kolarctic ENPI CBC program and lasts until the end of 2014.
The Barents Mediasphere project aims to promote cross border communication in the Barents region. It has organized journalist training courses in Finland and Russia and has established the Barents Editor´s Forum, a meeting place for editors from Barents region.
The second Editor´s Forum will be arranged in Rovaniemi, Finland, October 2014. project is led by the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland and partners are Russian state TV and radio company Murman and web news portal BarentsObserver from Kirkenes, Norway.