“What the fake? Make the news great again!”

On the 26^th of July, around fifty participants have come together to Strasbourg, France to convene on an Erasmus+ seminar entitled “What the fake? Make the news great again!” from 15 different European countries including Germany, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Estonia, Portugal, Italy, Great Britain, Spain, Turkey, Romania, and France. It brought together 50 participants, by far the largest gathering in my experience. The seminar is aimed at bringing best practices from different countries to tackle the phenomena of fake news and create awareness for the youth and youth workers. The seminar was organized by Amsed and held in a beautiful area of La Vancelle, near the mountain of Vosges.

This 10 days training has used interactive non-formal method of learning using activities, which improve hard and soft skills. Among others, we were asked to do street interviews with the public before (in every participant countries realities) and during the training (in Strasbourg), role plays as journalists, sharing of fact checking software tools, open spaces for sharing experiences, invited experts to the seminar on the topic, workshops on youth competences, workshop on creating projects, safari photo, and creating individual youth pass and many more. The seminar was great opportunity to make networks and cooperation among the sending organizations for future follow up projects.

We as a Finnish team would like to express our gratitude for the organizers and facilitators for the wonderful times we have spent in tackling the issue, the knowledge and skills they have shared with us, which definitely would like to implement in Finland. Once again let’s make the news great again!