YoCoJoin
- Project Type
- Youth Journalism
- Title
- YoCoJoin
- Release Date
- 2025
- Irish Partner
- Dublin Inquirer
- Co-Partners
- Omroep Tilburg
- SideStreet Malta
- Media Diversity Institute Western Balkans
- Nyugat Media
- Zavod Časoris
- Media Diversity Institute Global
- Funding Strand
- News Journalism Partnerships
- Year Funded
- 2025
YoCoJoin was an EU project funded under Creative Europe’s Cross Sector strand News Journalism partnerships from November 2024 to January 2025. The full title of the project was Empowering the Youth: Strengthening Local News Media Services Through the Youth Community Journalism Initiative. The Irish partner in the YoCoJoin project was local independent newspaper, Dublin Inquirer.
The YoCoJoin project aimed to make journalism more inclusive and engaging by bringing young community reporters into local newsrooms. This initiative not only aimed to increase the availability of high-quality, youth-driven journalism but also to encourage young people’s interest in news.
Over two years, media organisations from seven countries - The Netherlands, Malta, Serbia, Hungary, Ireland, Slovenia, and Belgium - mentored young people in journalism, inspired by the approach of project leader Omroep Tilburg. Through training and hands-on experience, YoCoJoin aimed to strengthen the skills of partner organisations and share this model with other local media across Europe, helping create a more sustainable, community-centred news sector.
The Youth Community Journalism Initiative (YoCoJoin) initiated a 3 day programme to address the current challenges within the media industry, and to tackle the pressing issue of 'news deserts' - communities, whether rural or urban, with limited access to the kind of credible and comprehensive news that sustains grassroots democracy. Additionally, this programme aimed to reshape the landscape of newsrooms with the experiences of YoCoJoin.
What were the objectives of the YoCoJoin immersion workshops?
- Build capacity for local media organisations, with a focus on youth-driven community journalism.
- Test and refine a new Youth Community Journalism model for application across diverse media settings
- Create a network of local media organisations to support each other to fight against media deserts.
- Strengthen the representation and voice of young community journalists in media organizations.
'Part of why we were founded was to give more people who might otherwise miss out a chance to try journalism. We were also already conscious that younger voices tend to be missing from news media. One of our past reporters had taken on a 'kids in the city' beat for a while, and we also ran kid's reviews of kid's books which was fun. So when one of the partners contacted us about the project, it ticked many boxes for us.' Lois Kapila, deputy editor and a reporter at Dublin InquirerLearn More
About Irish Partner Dublin Inquirer
Launched in 2015, Dublin Inquirer is a local, independent newspaper, dedicated to quality public-interest journalism. They publish online weekly and in print monthly. Dublin Inquirer publishes stories that otherwise wouldn’t be covered - housing and homelessness, transport, immigrant life, the environment and climate, planning, arts and culture, and food.
'We started with 30 young people, mostly living in Dublin, but some further afield in Ireland - and from all different backgrounds. We ran a three-month course, with two-hour classes once a week. Those classes covered all kinds of stuff from discussions about 'what is news?', media ethics, interviewing, fact-checking and mobile journalism. We were lucky enough to have some great speakers and trainers as part of it too. We had Patrick Freyne of the Irish Times talk about interviewing; Stephen Bourke, a courts reporter, shared how to go about that; and Glen Mulcahy, the founder of Mojofest, ran sessions on mobile journalism and photography. We tried to have the classes be as interactive and engaging as possible.' Lois Kapila, deputy editor and a reporter at Dublin InquirerLearn More