Media competence should be given "the highest media policy priority", demanded Pietro Supino at the beginning of the year . The publisher's president is right, but only in part. The "highest media policy priority" is certainly currently given to current and more fundamental issues such as "No Billag", the role of the SDA, the future SRG or the new media law - in other words, pillars of basic information provision. In addition, Supino makes it too easy for himself when he demands that media professionals, in addition to their tasks, which have become more extensive in recent years, also lecture in classrooms on correct quoting or the two-source rule.
To see how it could work, it helps to take a usa rcs data look at Austria. There, the "Kleine Zeitung", a regional newspaper from Graz, launched the "Kleine Kinderzeitung" eleven years ago. Originally with the intention of being able to sell more subscriptions to the regular "Kleine Zeitung". The project developed into a self-running project. In addition to the weekly edition, which now has a circulation of 20,000 copies, the publisher soon began printing special editions on the EU and the 2017 elections in France ( persoenlich.com reported ).
Journalists do not have to go into classrooms as teachers, as Supino suggests. It would be much more clever to give a project to a few particularly committed people, where they produce a paper for children, similar to the Austrian model. Printed, with high editorial standards, with topicality - as unbiased as possible, factual and packaged in an easy-to-read story. Even in Zurich alone there are enough people between the ages of eight and twelve that this could even be commercially viable.