10 September 2023. Today the 19th M100 Young European Journalists Workshop starts, for which 20 young journalists from 14 European countries (including Armenia, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, North Macedonia, Spain and Ukraine) have been selected. Under the title “Reporting on Climate Change – and its Significance for Democracy”, the participants will spend four days discussing the following questions: “What does climate change mean for journalism? Are journalists adequately covering the climate events that are having such an impact on all our lives? Does journalism need to change to better inform the public? And how does climate change and its coverage affect our democracy?
Journalism, especially crisis reporting, has traditionally covered events rather than processes. But climate change is a process for which newsrooms are already struggling to find the right images. Therefore, many newsrooms, including AFP, dpa, Deutsche Welle, Financial Times, Die Zeit, Washington Post and Süddeutsche Zeitung, are establishing climate editors and producing climate specials.
The participants will spend four days working with renowned experts such as journalist and author Alexandra Borchardt, who wrote the recent EBU report on journalism and climate change, Sven Egenter, editor-in-chief and managing director of Clean Energy Wire, and Alexandre Brutelle, co-founder and director of the Environmental Investigative Forum in Paris. Ursula Hyzy from AFP, Tatjana Kondratenko and Louise Osborne from Deutsche Welle and Christine Cornelius from dpa will present best practice examples of how they implement climate reporting in their ne
wsrooms, how climate-related stories are realised across different platforms and formats and which forms of storytelling they use.
Finally, Angelina Davydova and Iryna Ponedelnik from n-east will give practical tips on how to collaborate across borders.
See the full agenda here.
On 14 September, the young journalists will attend the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium “Between Ambition and Disorder – The Future of Democracy” and the presentation of the M100 Media Award to the Women Life Freedom Movement of Iran, which will be accepted on behalf of Iranian women’s rights activist Shima Babaei in the Orangery of the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam-Sanssouci. The laudation will be delivered by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. The award ceremony will be livestreamed from 18:00 hrs (CET) here.
The workshop takes place in the so-called “Truman Villa” in Potsdam, where the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom has its headquarters since 2001. The house was so named because the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, stayed here for almost three weeks during the Potsdam Conference on 15 July 1945, together with the US Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, and the Defence Advisor, William D. Leahy.
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom is also a supporter of the M100 workshop for young European journalists. It is also supported by the Press and Information Office of the German Federal Government and Journalismfund Europe.
