Getting Started in NIE

Sandra McGehee, The Brownsville Herald, Helen Jones and Audrey Eoff, Educational Consultants, USA

The Texans provided an outline of key points to consider when starting an NIE programme.

Among them:

  Publicise your programme through features stories about its activities, events, posters and other ways in an effort to involve your community and creating a bond between newspapers and schools.

  Communicate with colleagues and make sure that everyone understands "it is a joint corporate effort that they should support," said Ms McGehee.

  Hire the right person. "It is probably easier to teach NIE to someone who has an educational background and can also speak the language of education," says Ms McGehee. But whomever you hire, "make sure they are creative, enthusiastic, and has good communication, organisation and people skills."

NIE in Difficult Circumstances

Ofelia Corradine, El Tiempo, Colombia

Everyone knows that Colombia is a difficult, violent country. It has 28,000 guerrillas. There were 2,750 kidnappings last year and 76 attacks on villages.

But, to put those things in perspective, Ms Corradine did some math. In a country of 43 million people, guerrillas represent only 0.07 percent of the population. The number of kidnappings were 0.01 percent of the population. And with 12,000 villages, the attacks hit .63 percent.

The point is, "we do other things," says Ms Corradine. Despite the violence, Colombia is a vibrant, dynamic society with much culture and education.

Colombia has had an NIE programme since 1993 - originally with government support but, since 1998, the newspaper association Andiarios has sole responsibility for the programme.

100 schools take part and receive daily subscriptions, bulletins for teachers, work guides and a handbook of ideas on how to use newspapers in the classroom.

In some classes, the newspaper is the only text available.

Ms Corradine’s presentation examined some of Colombia’s best NIE projects.

Using Alternative Media to Attract Readers to Print

Lisa Blakeway, Chief Executive, Johnnic Learning, South Africa

Mobile telephones, text messaging and the internet are the communication tools of choice for young and hip South Africans. And so the Sunday Times newspaper decided to use this attraction to convert them to print.

It did so through three competitions that linked electronic media with the paper.

In the first, open to anyone under 21-years old, readers used text messaging from a portable telephone to send in answers to quiz questions. The quiz and the answers were found in different sections of the newspaper.

The objective was to raise funds to put multimedia education kits in poor schools and to familiarise children with different sections of a newspaper.

Although newspapers might feel uncomfortable charging children premium rates for SMS messaging, it was justified in this case, says Ms Blakeway - all the money was donated to the project.

Ms Blakeway also explained the other two projects and had this advice for NIE professionals: "we need to start experimenting, we need to get creative, we need to get to know the children we’re writing for. By all means, be cheeky, take chances, and have a ball!"