In the previous months young people from Prijepolje, located on the Serbian south-west, were involved in television content production initiated by the local outlet TV Forum. Fifteen high school students have gone through media training, whilst four of them stayed working as summer interns, as a part of the business development project implemented by this trusted and well recognized media.
The goal of their business plan is to motivate and informally educate young people, especially young women, in media literacy, community engagement, and activism in order to increase citizens' trust in the media on the one hand and the role of the media in increasing the visibility of women's issues and sensitizing the audience to gender equality on the other.
“Through expanding our community and our outreach to young people, we want to strengthen the existing business models. With growing content and better connection with the community we will gain more traffic and better engagement with our content,” said Sanja Malešić from TV Forum.
Also, this direct interaction helped the outlet to understand what are the topics of interest for young people, what social networks they use, and type of content they preferred.
“Working on production of youth related content was a really useful and interesting experience. Taking in consideration that due to COVID-19 we were not attending classes at the faculty, it was an excellent opportunity, a sort of practical work,” said Nevena Cvijović, journalism student and coordinator of Women in the media project.
Students produced content started airing in November and will continue to do so on a weekly basis. Materials are prepared until the end of year and production continues in 2022, also.
TV Forum was founded in 2008 as the first civil society TV station in Serbia to be founded by women. The Forum info web portal was founded in 2016. Both of these media operate within the Association “Women's Forum Prijepolje.”
