European Youth News Exchange
The European Youth News Exchange (Y-NEX) will be an EU related news service ran by the youth, for the youth. The service will provide local, regional, national and European news gathered and produced by youth trained in mobile journalism. Contributing authors will be individuals and representatives of youth organizations; young citizen journalists and media professionals. The service will offer news in text, photo, audio and video formats. All materials will be available in professional standards. All the materials will be offered free of charge for EU related information and educational purposes. The materials will be produced and published in the native languages of the project partners, but will be translated, indexed and referenced in English.
The service will primarily target student and youth media as both providers and distributors of news, but will also be available to broadcasters, news agencies, written press, and anyone who seeks to spread the news available on Y-NEX. The service will provide assistance for aspiring citizen journalists wishing to cover youth related subjects in the form of free online training through a Mobile Journalism MOOC.
The Y-NEX service will be built as a media database that will be accessed through a website in English language. The filtering of the available content will be made possible based on format, theme, date, language and tags created by the author. A preview of the content will be available, however users will have to register (for free) in order to be able to download materials. Authors of the news will also have to register (for free) in order to be able to upload their content. Besides being a news exchange service, the website will be a news portal in itself, featuring the latest uploaded content. Both, the news exchange service and the news portal will be developed in accordance with W3C accessibility standards.
The Y-NEX service and news portal will be divided into 8 main themes, following the structure of the EU Youth Stratefy: Education & training, Employment & entrepreneurship, Health & well-being, Participation, Voluntary activities, Social inclusion, Youth & the world, Creativity & culture.
All the authors registered with the Y-NEX service will have a personal profile page visible only to the other registered authors. The profile page will contain the background and contact information of the author and the links to their content published on the Y-NEX service. In effect, this will create a network that will allow communication and promote collaboration between the authors on the local, regional, national and European levels.
The Y-NEX service will be closely integrated with social media, allowing for easy dissemination of news and content. Besides allowing its users and visitors to share content on their own social media channels, the Y-NEX service will have its own social media presence with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn.