Noored meediatekstide loojana koolilehtede näitel
Date
2009
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
School should prepare youngsters for stepping into the „real life“. Media literacy plays a
big part in everyday life of an adult. One must be able to choose the right information
from variety of different mediums and their countless messages. It is also very important
for a person to be able to judge the trustworthiness of the media messages and what kind
of personal impact they might have to them.
One way of introducing and developing media literacy amongst youth is working with
the school newspaper. School newspaper is like a „mini-society“, where to learn how to
schoose subjects and sources, how to write and edit the material and analyse each others
pieces after publishing.
There have been couple of studys related to teaching media in schools in University of
Tartu previously, but they have mainly been about pedagogical aspects of the issue. The
aim of current study was to analyse the content itself of the school newspapers.
I used the quantitative content analysis to find out wich are the most commonly used
genres and subjects in school newspapers, who are the favourite sources, what is the main
style and how informative the headlines are. I chose 12 newspapers from 54 newspapers
sent to best school newspaper contest in 2008 and encoded 172 articles.
Results showed that the most popular genre was news, interviews were also widely used.
The number of sources used was high in polls and interviews. Young reporters tended to
rely only on their own views and experiences in newsstories and problem related articles.
Author was the only source in 103 articles from 172. Fellow students and teachers got
their chance to talk mainly in polls and columns.
Important part of media literacy is to decode media messages, also to write them oneself
and to be able to reason and to be ctritical if needed. Content analyses showed that in
2008 years school papers only quarter of articles were reasoning or analytical. Half of the
articles were merely retelling the events and quarter presenting information. Quarter of the headlines were phrased too vaguely. There were also articles, wich didn’t have an
headline at all – they started right next to the name of the section.
It would be really interesting to observe closely, where the standards of school
newspapers are moving to. Every year many young people start high school and take
interest in school journalism. Media teaching in schools is in constant progress and the
quality of the articles should rise all the time. It is not important how many of those high
school pupils come to study journalism in University of Tartu and choose media as their
profession. It is essential to understand that experiencing media creating processes
themselves helps youngsters to be more critical towards the media around them and
shape their opinions.
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, noored, meedia, väikelehed, tekstid, koolilehed