Journalism and the Future Webinar - Report on the final multiplier event

The Webinar “Journalism and the Future” was organized by the Portuguese team within the framework of the NEWSREEL Project. This multiplier event would have originally taken place in March 2020 in Lisbon. Although the programme was scheduled and organized, it couldn’t be held due to restrictions because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Being so, the event was reprogrammed to take place online, in the form of a Zoom Webinar.  Its main goal was to produce discussion about journalism and the future, mainly in what regards the digital media. The other aim of the event was to present the results of the NEWSREEL project, and communicating the work of the project’s team.

Professor Ramón Salaverría, from the University of Navarra, in Spain, was the Keynote speaker of the event.

Salaverría spoke about “Digital native media trends” and shared his vision and knowledge about digital media’s trends. Ramón Salaverría is a professor and researcher of digital journalism. Associate Dean of Research at the School of Communication, University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) and former Chair of the Journalism Studies Section at ECREA (2010-12).

Gábor Polyák, head of the NEWSREEL project - New Skills for the Next Generation of Journalists, from the University of Pécs, in Hungary, presented all of the outcomes of the project: the comparative research report, the syllabi on the four professional fields, the e-learning materials based on the syllabi, the teaching guide connected to the learning materials, and the glossary, the collection of the most important terms connected to the fields of the project.

Polyák also introduced the upcoming NEWSREEL2 project, that aims to continue the work developed with NEWSREEL. Both project are Erasmus + financed projects and their ultimate goal is to improve skills of a new generation of European journalists and to contribute to the strengthening of the common European democratic public sphere by improving the collaborative and cross-border journalism that is able to elaborate and make tangible the huge amount of available data, and that is based on a predictable business strategy and a firm ethical foundation.

There were 66 participants at the event from several countries (eg. Poland, Hungary, Germany, Romania, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, etc.), within Europe, but also from Brazil.

The Q&A session was very interesting, with interventions of participants from several countries. This was the last multiplier event of the NEWSREEL1 project.