Bjarke Calvin, Sophia Jörgensen, Iben Völund – Building a Legacy for 21st-century Journalists
“Our world is connected by stories” says Bjarke Calvin. For him stories are not just a way to share information but a way of nurturing human connection. So what to do with the fact that news stories we interact with are more and more defined by social media? Tech-giants that dominate the media space, do not foster storytelling as their primary goal is generating advertisements. . To free stories from the linear, centralised format that we are currently trapped in, we need to hack the current system. “Before news was just something we consumed, now we got to be part of it.” explains Iben Völund, a high school student and collaborator of Bjarke. Using the Duckling App the students wrote and published their own stories.Iben and Sophia explained that reading a story created by someone their age is more interesting. They are more directly related to their own experiences. Packaging stories for the younger generations is important. As the students explain during the talk, online news articles look boring for them, “there needs to be more images, videos and probably some special effects.” Making the stories more accessible means finding strategies better than paywalls to curate news, and learning from other ways of finalizing news stories. The Duckling team believes that if we could wrap the stories differently, it would give agency to the younger generation. News does not need to be boring and fear-inducing, it can be hopeful.
