On 24 October 2024, we were invited to take part in the Alternative Education Week at Onisifor Ghibu Theoretical High School in Sibiu. The Alternative Education Week is a yearly nationwide initiative designed to help students develop their creativity and their socio-emotional abilities. The workshops were conducted with two groups of 9th-graders.
By solving media puzzles in smaller groups, the students were prompted to come up with their own definition of what a lead/lede should be (5 Ws and one H) and to infer the inverted pyramid structure of news articles. Clickbait, tabloid and broadsheet/quality journalism were analysed based on examples. Given that these students’ preferred source of news is social media (followed by local online newspapers and national TV channels), the continued relevance of the traditional structure of news items was discussed.
Predictably and inevitably, fake news, deepfake technologies and factcheckers were “musts” and made the object of the workshops’ closing activities, triggering debates on the students’ need for “truth” and their responsibility as future tech professionals.
Text by Corina Selejan