Legacy case study “Combating news avoidance among Generation Z”
In many countries, millions of people are consistently avoiding the news. This phenomenon is called news avoidance and is most often associated with less privileged groups (e.g., people from lower socioeconomic classes, and people uninterested in politics). At the same time, this is also a democratic problem, since enlightened democracies require various groups of people to take part in political decisions and be a part of the news environment. Today, the problem is also growing among younger people (Generation Z), who constitute nearly one-third of the world’s population. Before the 75th World News Media Congress, 70 international students from the International People’s College (IPC) in Elsinore north of Copenhagen participated in a full-day co-creation workshop facilitated by SDU. The workshop – supported also by WAN-IFRA, Danske Medier, TV2 Echo, and Copenhagen Legacy Lab – resulted in The Copenhagen Criteria: seven news values to guide news organisations in how to engage with Generation Z.
New digital approaches for young audience engagement with journalistic content
This white paper explores the concept, development, and potential impact of NewsArcade, demonstrating how this unique format and authoring tool can play a pivotal role in addressing the challenges of news engagement in today’s society. By combining gamification with reliable news content, NewsArcade offers an engaging, educational, and interactive experience that both informs and empowers young users. Our findings show that NewsArcade not only boosts interest in current affairs but also strengthens users’ understanding of complex global issues.
Post-graduate course
This deliverable focuses on the development of an innovative online inspirational and instructional training course tailored for media professionals. This course is structured into “nano modules,” designed to fit seamlessly into the busy schedules of journalists and editors. These modules enable them to engage with the new NewsArcade editorial methodology in brief, digestible segments amidst their daily newsroom tasks. The primary objective is to assist news creators in gamifying their news stories and seamlessly integrating them into our Content Management System (CMS) for publishing. The course comprises nine distinct modules, each presented in concise video formats ranging from 1 to 5 minutes. Through the nine comprehensive modules, participants are introduced to various aspects of NewsArcade, from its unique user experience and the critical need for new audience engagement strategies to the specifics of gamifying news stories and addressing the preferences of GenZ. These modules are publicly accessible via the NewsArcade YouTube Channel. By providing these modules, we aim to equip media professionals with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively use the NewsArcade platform, thus enhancing their ability to engage and inform their audiences in a dynamic and interactive manner.
D2.1 User Requiremenents
“What should News Arcade do for me as a young adult media user?”
This question has been underlying all research behind the present report, in which we suggest a series of requirements, extrapolated from preliminary answers to that simple question. This report investigates requirements for designing a journalistic tool to engage young adults in the news through gamification of journalism from three stake holding perspectives:
1. End users – young adults from 18 to 35 years. Requirements were investigated through a desktop study examining young adults’ media behaviour, but also covering news literacy and gamification aspects.
2. Newsrooms – journalists and other news content producers, explored through an online survey amongst journalists from news media organizations in Cyprus, Denmark, France and the Netherlands.
3. Publishers – private news media houses as well as public broadcasters, identified through in depth interviews with primarily executive media professionals.
D2.2 NewsArcade Design
This document outlines the technical requirements and UX design of the NewsArcade prototype. The document first gives the context of the work and presents the main challenges as resulted from the initial user requirements research. It then delves into the design of the new gamified news format, sketching two different approaches to the user experience and flow, depending on the primary target group and outcome priorities for the consortium. The report further describes the initial technical specifications, considering topics like data tracking and software infrastructure, presenting several architecture designs and flow diagrams to highlight how components of the NewsArcade system will interact.
D2.5 Evaluation Report
The purpose of this report is to evaluate and summarize the results obtained from the MVP experiments with stakeholders, conducted as part of the NewsArcade project. The report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the insights, feedback, and opinions expressed by the participants during the workshops. It serves as a means to capture and document the key findings, observations, and recommendations arising from the stakeholder experiments process.
D3.4 Pilot report
This report serves as a comprehensive evaluation of the piloting workshops and scale-up experiments conducted within the framework of the NewsArcade-Seriously Play the News project (part of the second iteration of the tool which was launched in November 2023).
D3.9 Pilot data
This report serves as a comprehensive evaluation of the final round of piloting workshops and scale-up
experiments conducted within the framework of the NewsArcade project.
NewsArcade final version and manual
The project follows an interactive development methodology with multiple cycles of design, development, experimentation and piloting, evaluation and refinement of design. Following the release of NewsArcade v3 (documented in Deliverable D3.2) and the final cycle of piloting with journalists and scale-up experiments, valuable feedback has been collected as to how to improve the format and the underlying Content Management System (CMS) which enables the creation of the NewsArcade stories. This document accompanies the final release (NewsArcade v4), describing the main changes that were implemented and providing a manual for how to use the system
NewsArcade in the Classroom
The NewsArcade team, along with a panel of media literacy experts, explored how to best use our tool in education to enhance news literacy. This effort resulted in a draft lesson plan called NewsArcade in the Classroom, designed for secondary and higher education. The idea is to bring journalists directly into the classroom, giving students the chance to interact with them and gain a deeper understanding of how news is made. The NewsArcade tool functions as a conversation starter.
This lesson plan has been created to highlight what adjustments are needed to make the tool even more effective for teaching. It also helps us explore the best ways to integrate the tool into educational settings.
Please note that the NewsArcade in the Classroom lesson format is currently in a draft stage and is not yet fully functional for implementation. While the format serves as an inspiration and outlines the potential of the tool, certain features and functionalities are under development. We advise educators to use this draft as an inspirational guide rather than for immediate classroom use.
The lesson format entails:
An introduction to NewsArcade in the classroom: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nrp1EzhYo6_qXibRdEjqadynA5ujVdTo/view?usp=sharing
A slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CWxzLjKk9KSVYYFaH_ywONdaiVUnqcFH/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=102201237118131254700&rtpof=true&sd=true
A manual: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tuHOmYHCSWv0RKwbmPsP0gahJ_P98UQO/view?usp=sharing