Stop Honor Killing
Project/Organization Name: Youth Ki Awaaz: Mouthpiece for the Youth
Initiated by: Youth Ki Awaaz
About the project: Youth Ki Awaaz is a portal that presents views, opinions, analysis and reports on issues that matter to the young generation. This platform mobilises and engages young people in participatory and collaborative journalism. Currently, it has over 4 million hits, nearly 900,000 page views and 150,000 unique readers every month.
Youth Ki Awaaz, which literally translates to ‘voice of the youth’ in English, is an online platform for young people to express themselves on issues of importance. The portal combines the dynamism of the youth with the power of journalism and new media to create compelling content that reaches out to a mass audience in order to create awareness, and is thought provoking. The website makes best use of online journalism and new media tools such as blogs and forums to mobilise youths. The platform also runs India’s popular work-from-home online journalism in-ternship program that trains and equips young people in skills to express themselves on crucial is-sues and also develop skills for professional communication.
Scope of case study:
With an outreach of over 4.5 million readers, a majority of them being in the age group 18 to 28, Youth Ki Awaaz provides brands and organizations exclusive opportunities to engage with this audience and promote their products. YKA moves a step ahead from the conventional forms of advertising and create focused youth outreach campaigns for these brands and companies.
Youth Ki Awaaz has grown up as a platform that is preferred by partners of various fellowships, events and leadership forums to reach out to the youth. Their revenue model does not depend on only one form of advertising of brand domain – and rather stretches out to an array of institutes, NGOs, organizations and companies wanting to engage with young people.
YKA seeks this platform to extend offline also:
• A good college based outreach that encourages students to write and engage with Youth Ki Awaaz at a local level
• An outreach and tie-up with alumni organizations and youth groups, NGOs, and young professional groups in various states
• A strategic tie-up with colleges and universities or student councils in the same to engage students even further
• A network of stringers and reporters in various states and cities, irrespective of age and institutional affiliation, who help generate good quality local reports
Value proposition: Making best use of online journalism tools and new media skills, it mobilizes and engages young people in participatory and collaborative journalism. Reaching out to over 4.5 million readers every month, the platform also runs arguably India’s most popular work-from-home online journalism internship program which trains and equips young people in skills to express themselves on crucial issues and also develop skills for professional communication.
Characteristics/uniqueness: Over 15000 young people have written their opinions for the platform;
• Engaged 2000 young people at any point to write their opinions on pertinent issues;
• Trained over 1200 young people as a part of the work-from-home training program;
• Did stories that did not find space in mainline media but have been very pertinent;
• Actions on issues such as lack of safety for women in Delhi Metro;
• Provided a strong platform for non-profits to engage with young people and create an outreach channel for their issues;
• Given voice to a large unheard community in India.
Learning from the Project : The youth today need a free and unbiased platform where they can talk about issues close to their heart – freely and also get trained in the process.
Issues & Challenges: Gaining momentum at a fast pace is a challenge since media startups have a long incubation period, and moreover the revenue generation is very slow. However, we have now reached a stage where we are slowly and steadily overcoming this problem.
Project/Organization URL: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com
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