deBuren

Antwerp is this years' European Youth Capital so it is the perfect venue for an international conference at which young people’s voices will be heard. From 27th until 29th October 2011, the YoungPress.eu conference takes place. 100 young journalists(-in-the-making), age 18-26, from 18 different European countries will enter into a dialogue with renowned speakers, including Paul Lewis (The Guardian), Sylvie Kauffman (Le Monde), Henk Blanken, Annabel McGoldrick, Alex Wood, Olaf Koens, Flemish minister of Media Ingrid Lieten, and many others.

The media field is constantly changing. As the mainstream media try to survive by holding on to their traditional values, the new generation of news and opinion makers need to innovate and experiment in order to establish new models of first-class journalism. The central themes during the conference are: the omnipresence of ‘instant’ media, high-quality journalism under threat, the spread of biased information, new models and experimentation by independent journalists.

Journalism and Digital Change; The Good News Story of the Future

The conference is a closed event, but the keynote lecture by Paul Lewis (The Guardian) on the 27th of October at 20:15 is open to the public. Paul Lewis is Special Projects Editor for The Guardian. He heads up a team that is finding new angles on breaking news stories, including using multimedia and ‘crowdsourcing'. Lewis used these techniques in his investigation into the details of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the 2009 G20 protest in London, for which he was elected 'Reporter of the year' at the British Press Awards in March 2010. He also won the Tony Bevins Rat Up a Drain Pipe award for outstanding investigative journalism. He previously worked at The Washington Post as the Stern Fellow. His keynote will focus on journalism in the new, fast-moving digital era. How will the media evolve in the 21st century?

The conference is an initiative of the Evens Foundation and StampMedia in collaboration with AEYC2011, KBC, deBuren and Arenbergschouwburg.