PRESS RELEASE

A European Project to bring young people closer to traditional media through gamification : NewsArcade – Seriously Play The News!

Whether they are pure broadcasters or companies providing news content in
different formats, media outlets are all challenged like never before. They need to
reaffirm their importance and usefulness in our modern technological society
and create new relations with younger audiences (young adults aged 18-35) that
seem distant from traditional media.
NewsArcade-Seriously Play the News project’s general objective is to tackle these
challenges by closely bringing together journalism and news consumption
through gamification. By creating the necessary tools and a new format for
gamified news that can tell a comprehensive 360 degrees news story, the project
aims to improve young adults’ skills in news literacy, build critical thinking skills
and thus strengthen the position of media outlets that will also be able to
leverage the improved engagement in news media and journalism.
The project is co-funded by the European Education and Culture Executive
Agency as part of Creative Europe- Media (project no: 101060250), has a two-year
duration (September 2022-August 2024) and involves eight partners from five
European countries.
On the 5th and 6th of October, 2022, the consortium met in Nicosia, Cyprus with
the aim to kick-start the project. The partners have worked together to align a
common vision for the project and discussed upcoming milestones and
deliverables. The two-day hybrid kick-off meeting was hosted by DIAS Media as
the coordinator of the project, at their premises.

Partners have been working on defining the requirements engineering of the
authoring tool, led by SDU, by collecting data through desk-based and
field-based research. In particular, the desk-based research included a literature
review of existing studies on the trends and attitudes of young people in regard
to news consumption and traditional media and the field-based research
included both surveys and interviews. The surveys addressed media professionals
(such as journalists) with the aim to collect their experiences, needs and
expectations of this gamified news tool and the interviews were conducted with
stakeholders of media outlets (such as editors, publishers, decision-makers, etc.)
to also collect the gaps that exist as well as how the tool can be used by them on
a practical level. The results have been analyzed in the project’s first result, which
is the user requirements report and will be available online soon. Currently,
following our research findings, we are working on the format and technical
design of the NewsArcade game. The MVP of the authoring tool will be available
in May 2023 for testing with publishers.
The following organizations are participating in the project: DIAS Media
Productions (Project Coordinator) – Cyprus; IN2 Digital Innovations – Germany;
Portaplay APS – Denmark; WAN-IFRA – France; Alliance de la Presse d’Information
Generale (APIG) – France; Syddansk Universitet (SDU) – Denmark and Stichting
Nederlands Instituut Voor Beeld en Geluid (NISV) – Netherlands.
If you are a young adult 18-35 years old, media professional (journalist, content
creator, trainer), or stakeholder (publisher, editor, decision maker, policy maker)
who wishes to get involved in the upcoming experiments and training
opportunities of the project and/or interested to be informed with our project
news, contact us directly through our form here https://newsarcade.eu/contact/.
For more information visit our landing page: https://newsarcade.eu/.