MAGIC news archive
January 2005

AWARDS / CALL FOR ENTRIES
Canadian Awards of Excellence 2005

The Alliance for Children and Television (ACT) invites all Canadian producers of children’s and youth programs to compete for the English-Language Awards of Excellence 2005, which will be presented at an awards ceremony in Toronto in June 2005. All entries must be received at the ACT office in Montreal by no later than Friday, February 25, 2005, at 5 p.m.
The ACT Awards of Excellence honours English- and French-language productions in alternate years, with the 2005 edition being reserved for Canadian programs produced in English. To be eligible for the competition, programs must have aired in Canada, in English, for the first time between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2004.
MORE INFO

COMPETITIONS / OPPORTUNITIES
"Building a Secure Future Seeking Practical Solutions" - World Bank essay competition
What are the biggest obstacles you face in your daily life? What practical solutions would you propose to build a secure future for yourself and others?
Winning essays will be chosen for their originality, clarity and use of thoughtful yet concrete proposals for building a secure future. You are free to develop your essay in any way you find to be the most convincing.
MORE INFO

ARTICLES
IRAQ: Norwegian film-makers assist Kurdish colleagues
It's an example of international aid at its most basic. Jamal Penjwini, a young Iraqi Kurdish film-maker, is showing footage from a documentary he is preparing about smuggling over the Iran-Iraq border. Elderly men stumble forward under loads weighing more in kilos than their years. Poverty is omnipresent.
"This is very strong," said Anja Breien. "Edit it, send us a DVD copy and we will do our best to get it shown in Sweden. There's a festival of short films at Grimstad [in Norway] in March."
A director in her native Norway, Breien first came to the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah in 2003. Why, she asked then, when there were "Kurdish" films from Iran and Turkey, had she never heard of an Iraqi Kurdish feature film? Her hosts agreed that it was nothing to do with a shortage of good material. What they lacked, they told her, was expertise: people to teach them how to structure a film and prepare a script.
FULL ARTICLE

Les moyens de communication - Enquete d'audience
Children: The new media consumer in Madagascar
The study, launched in November 2004 by the Minister of Communication and the National Statistics Institute, reveals that 76% of all households in the country listen to the radio; 32 percent watch TV and 27 percent read newspapers. The study also pointed to the fact that village meetings remain the first source of information for most people and that children, surprise, surprise, listen to the radio as well!
The study, technically and financially supported by UNICEF, was conducted in 13 sites in the country, amongst some 10,000 households.
FULL REPORT IN FRENCH (pdf - 618 KB)

INTERNET / CHILD PROTECTION
Smart Kids
Sexual predators on the Internet create a problem for state and local law enforcement, but new technologies are helping. Every year, more children of all ages go online to study, have fun and communicate with the world at large. The Internet is becoming an even more integral part of our children's lives, and most are ill equipped to protect themselves online.
FULL TEXT

WORKSHOPS
OneMinutesJr workshop season starts in the Netherlands

The first OneMinutesJr workshop in 2005 will be held in Hilversum, Netherlands, from March 11-14 and will be part of the "I love Hillywood" video festival.
The opening of the festival will take place on the 10th of March and will be followed by a three-week video exposition. During the whole exposition, a selection of OneMinutesJr videos from former workshops will be shown. The participants who can apply to be part of this workshop have to live in Hilversum or at least study there. The aim of the workshop is to have a Dutch workshop with young people who represent the multicultural society of Holland. There will be Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and Dutch participants as well as other teenagers from other cultural backgrounds. The topic of the workshop is "My world in one minute".

ARTICLES
The news is good? They must be kidding (IHT)

PARIS - A new anchor on the nightly news made his debut this month, delivering headlines with the wheezy voice of a wind-up robot and a nose shaped like a hot air balloon.
The beady-eyed cartoon hero Quotillon is not a standard broadcast "hunk." But he is the star nonetheless of his own 10-minute daily news show for children, one of the first of its kind distributed over the Internet as a Webcast.
The star and his news show, "Mon Quotidien TV," or "My TV Daily," are the creation of Play Bac Presse, a French company that is evolving into an unlikely children's media conglomerate on both sides of the Atlantic.
FULL ARTICLE

ARTICLES
In France, children's paper bucks trend for troubled press

PARIS (AFP) - At a time of deepening crisis in the French press industry, one national newspaper is at least bucking the trend - making money and drawing in new readers with a colourful mix of hard news and human interest.
"Mon Quotidien" - My Daily - was launched exactly 10 years ago Wednesday. It has a print-run of 60,000, is delivered every morning across the country and like every other paper has splashed this week with harrowing images of the Asian tsunami aftermath.
The only difference with the rest of the pack is the market: Mon Quotidien is a newspaper for children.
FULL ARTICLE
MORE INFO IN FRENCH

ARTICLES
Hebron, my home

On a dark, chill Autumn night, Tel Aviv’s normally quiet College for Geographical Photography is abuzz with activity. Spotlights illuminate the trees in the courtyard; tables are loaded with bottles of red wine and snacks. Children thread their way through the congregated people, laughing and pushing one another. But, despite appearances, this isn’t a family event, a wedding or a birthday party. The boisterous children, a mixture of Jewish and Muslim kids from the southern West Bank town of Hebron, are in fact the stars of the opening night of the college’s photographic show, “Hebron, My Home.”
The exhibition is the culmination of an 18-month collaborative project between French news agency AFP and two of its photographers, Israeli Menachem Kahana, and Palestinian Hazem Bader. The two photographers chose a group of fourteen neighbouring Hebron children, aged between 6 and 18, with no previous experience of photography, to capture, in images, their everyday lives. What makes this project unique, however, is that half of the kids are Israelis living in two small orthodox Jewish enclaves of the city; the other half, though just across the street, are Palestinian Muslims.
Each group of seven children was provided with digital cameras, instruction on how to use them, and then sent off to photograph the world as they see it. Every week throughout the period, Kahana and Bader met with the kids, setting them fresh targets and challenges in order to truly distill the essence of their lives into a series of pictures. The resulting exhibition, now running in Tel Aviv until December 31st, displays the outcome of the project: 60 photos of life in Hebron, selected from the total 5000 the children shot during the year and a half period.
FULL ARTICLE

ARTICLES
Kool-Aid's No Longer Cool: Kraft Overhaul's Media Buys Aimed At Kids
In the first significant media strategy shift by a major food marketer responding to pressure about childhood obesity, Kraft Foods Wednesday unveiled plans to dramatically overhaul its media plans aimed at children under the age of 11, instituting a self-imposed ban on advertising such products as Kool-Aid, Oreos and Chips Ahoy! Cookies to children.
Kraft said it would alter the mix of products it advertises on TV, radio and print media that are viewed primarily by children 6-11, including "many popular cartoon programs," toward products that meet proposed 2005 U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and to "phase out advertising in these media for products that don't."
FULL ARTICLE

FESTIVALS / OPPORTUNITIES
8th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival in Austin, Texas (USA)
Emergencia is the youth component of the 8th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, and is open to filmmakers under the age of 19. Preference is given to works produced by Latinos, Native Peoples of the Americas, and African-Americans, but this section is open to all young filmmakers.
Emergencia is produced by student participants in Cine Las Americas' education programs at Johnston High School. Feature and short films of all forms will be considered, including narrative, documentary, experimental, and animation.
The festival is scheduled for April 20 through 24, 2005, in Austin, Texas.
MORE INFO IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH

TV
Interactive children's television
Whether television is beneficial or harmful to children is an ongoing debate. But one thing is certain: The more often young viewers can interact, the more attractive the program becomes. Two projects in the US are testing interactive technologies with children's programming.
FULL ARTICLE

ARTICLES
Barn og nyheter (an article about the impact of violent scenes on TV and the tsunami images on children around the world - in Norwegian)
Forfatterne: Magne Raundalen er psykolog, Senter for krisepsykologi. Jan Vincens Steen er leder for Avis i Skolen Det er et paradoks at skolen ikke har utviklet en strategi for en barndom i mediealderen, skriver Magne Raundalen og Jan Vincens Steen.
FULL ARTICLE

RESOURCES
Tsunami education kits
A charitable group for children is sending information kits to teachers across Canada to assist them in helping students understand the effects of tsunamis in southeast Asia that have inundated the world with haunting images of grief and destruction.
Save the Children Canada has prepared separate kits for students in elementary and secondary schools, with the goal of helping young people understand the catastrophe that has claimed about 140,000 lives in 11 countries.
"Both of them deal with helping teachers to understand and help relate the latest headlines and the story of the tsunami and the impact on children and their lives to children in a classroom setting,'' said Rita Karakas, the group's CEO.
The elementary program includes physical activities to help children express their feelings and thoughts about the disaster.
"The activities will involve everything from using crayons to engaging in group discussions in a very gentle and soft level,'' Karakas said Monday.
FULL ARTICLE

ARTICLES
After the trauma - Children involved in the disaster need special help
The lovely blonde-haired boy seemed to be around three years old - old enough to talk. But he did not utter a word to anyone. A nurse and then translator asked him his name, his parents, his country, if he wanted anything.
But the young survivor of the weekend tragedy just sat still and silent, only his eyes wandering.
"He is in shock," said Piangthip Promphan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist of Samitivej Srinakarin Children's Hospital. "This is a common reaction after a tragic incident. Many survivors go through this feeling of numbness and disbelief." Other reactions include aggression, tremendous fear and sadness, she added.
"We're observing them [children] closely and hope that all trauma symptoms will diminish and disappear after a month or at most six months after this tragedy," she said.
FULL ARTICLE

RESOURCES
What is a Tsunami? - Kids to Kids website
With the recent scenes of death and destruction on TV, it is often difficult to explain to children what happened when the tsunami struck the coastal areas of South Asia.
FEMA, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency has a child-friendly website that gives explanations of the most important natural disasters such as the recent tsunami. The website address is www.fema.gov/kids.
UNICEF info on the tsunami in South Asia

ARTICLES
Teens take to the camera (USA)
Most of the five Harwood Union High School students who signed up to spend afternoons making a film with Waitsfield's Claudia Becker had never used a camera for anything more than home movies. Eight weeks later, however, "Open Hearts - Open Minds," an 18-minute documentary highlighting the Mad River Valley's efforts to build a community center, was complete.
FULL ARTICLE

OPPORTUNITIES
Essay contest for Latin American children
Education is the essential base for building a democratic society with justice. The Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of Save the Children Sweden is aware of it and invites all those people interested in contributing with reflections and valuable ideas to this debate through the Essay Contest on "Education in Latin American Future Scenes".
Submit a non-published essay written in Spanish or Portuguese to the e-mail: ensayovisionfutura@scslat.org.
The deadline is February 15 2005, and the essay must be submited in attached Word file, properly identified with the participant's name and address. The contest guidelines are on the web site www.scslat.org..
MORE INFO

CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
CRC now available online on MAGIC in 40 languages
The CRC in Dari (Afghanistan) and in Icelandic are the latest additions to the CRC database on MAGIC. Browse the different laguages here.

WEBSITES
UN Youth website now also in Russian

Other available languages are English, Spanish and French. Go to the UN Youth site

RESOURCES
Handling the media - A Free Toolkit from CIVICUS
This toolkit aims to provide useful insights and tips on how best to use the media. It is meant to be especially useful for organisations working through issues relating to the mass media, and for those who provide interviews to the media.
DOWNLOAD IN PDF (305 KB)

NEWS
Children gather online as The State of the World's Children 2005 launches
New York, New York, 9 December 2004-Sixteen-year old Mustafa lives in the Gaza Strip, where political conflict affects his daily life. "When I have an exam I just think about the political topics and I forget the exam and I have problems in my exams," he says.
FULL ARTICLE
STATE OF THE WORLD'S CHILDREN REPORT 2005

For older news, please go to the
ARCHIVE

MAGIC partners | Privacy policy | Top