Free Press under Pressure

ended

Free Press under Pressure (FPuP) is a European project organized by the Douzelage, a European Town Twinning organization of 28 partners towns from each EU member state and the UK. The amount of participating towns will be 13. The participants are appr. 52 young adults (18 – 30 years of age) from those participating towns. They will participate in five workshops around the theme of free ethical journalism versus media oppression, disinformation and unverified facts. The background of the project is the pressure on free press: • Governments that restrict the press through their information departments, by propaganda or even by new restrictive laws; • Social media spread information faster, unfiltered, even disinformation. Principles of journalism are not upheld; • Politicians make use of this and describe publications by the press as “fake news” at will; • A complex world with fast developing news that forces the press to choose for topics closer to home. The topic of our project “FPuP” connects to various EU-policies and initiatives. The objectives of “FPuP” are therefore to establish insights on how news is gathered and published, how to find a way through all news - through any channel - supplied, how to assess this information and last but not least, how to form a critical assessment/judgement on the news presented to them. This projects answers to the requirements and objectives of CERV and the sub-program “Town-Twinning and Networks of Towns. The target group is specified on age (18-30) and on gender balance. The project offers the participants five workshops lead by professionals from news media of higher education organizations. The results of the workshops are discussed plenary and will lead to a set of tools as mentioned above. The results of the project will be written down in an end report that will be disseminated to all member towns via alle available channels.