Diana has designed a comprehensive approach to fortifying the country’s alert system for generations to come. She convenes Caravan conversations in communities of all sizes outside big cities to surface shared challenges and catalyze younger people to solve them. She conducts media literacy trainings in partnership with schools and community groups. She engages a team of young people aged 19-26 to run Gen, știri and Gen Zette, thereby ensuring that more younger people consume peer-generated and -presented news about the country’s challenges and opportunities.
Diana leads on Caravan conversations and helps her team of young people grow to take the lead on the discussions. This initiative involves travel to several of Romania’s smaller cities and towns to engage directly with local youth. Schools and public libraries help to publicize the events. Topics of discussion include the importance of voting, opportunities for community activism, and how to spot disinformation. These conversations also surface what matters most to the younger people attending, which highlights what local schools and CSOs can then focus on to cultivate greater civic participation. Conversations add to the Gen, știri team’s understanding of their target audience and what they care about most. To date, more than 1,000 young people across nearly 20 smaller cities and towns have participated in what are essentially one part town hall and one part changemaking incubator.
Diana also works directly with schools to conduct media literacy workshops that engage students in skill-building. These include how to identify credible sources, how misinformation spreads, and how to verify something they read before sharing it with others. This work both complements what teachers and other school staff already focus on and activates them to do even more. Diana has also worked with students and professors at the University of Bucharest. More than 10,000 young people have participated to date, and around 200 of their teachers have also engaged in Diana’s professional media literacy trainings, thereby shifting pedagogy and curricula at more than 30 high schools outside the capital.
It was during one of these Caravan conversations that Diana, together with Teodor Tiță, first came up with the idea for Gen, știri, a project which leverages popular social media platforms Instagram and TikTok to disseminate news stories created by and for younger Romanians living outside the big cities. The model employs a peer-led approach where younger people themselves – all of whom grew up in small towns – decide what topics to focus on, create stories about, and post. Staff are trained in best practices by Diana’s co-founder Teo, himself a respected career journalist who has worked for both domestic and international media outlets. Stories are published daily.
Gen, știri reaches approximately three million unique accounts each month. Of these, 85-90% belong to those under the age of 35, and 65-70% to those under the age of 24. The trust that has been built between the team and its users tackles cynicism and disengagement. The success and reach of Gen, știri led to the launch of an English-language offshoot in March 2024. Also run by those in their 20s, Gen Zette focusses on news stories from Romania and neighboring countries to build the target audience’s knowledge of the region. Nearly 15,000 now follow its Instagram account, with correspondents stretching across 15 countries.
Diana has formed partnerships with journalists and CSOs to build credibility and scale her approach. But she makes clear that those she collaborates with must either work alongside younger people or otherwise center youth voices. Her work with DCN Global, an international community of digital professionals and journalists that Diana collaborates with, has contributed to the launch of Gen Zette and summer training camps for young journalists and activists from across Europe. At the core of all these partnerships is Diana’s skill at relationship- and network-building, which has helped to ensure that more professionals rethink how they engage and address younger peoples’ interests, news consumption habits, and desire for connection.
Other work of Forum Apulum complements these strategies. Gen, revista, a magazine that preceded the founding of Gen, știri, focuses on creative writing and media literacy and serves as a platform for young people to share their stories and perspectives. More than 100 young co-creators have led the magazine’s publication since its launch in 2020. An Illustrated Guide of Romanian Communism, which is intended to help younger people understand the harm communism did amidst revisionist narratives online, has more than 15,000 copies in circulation thanks to partnerships with schools and museums. The Others is a podcast highlighting how young people from different political points of view can dialogue on issues. And "Fake News Hunters" was a project that gathered specialists from Romania, Georgia, Greece, Italy, and Ukraine to analyze the spread of disinformation online during the COVID pandemic.
Diana wants to scale the Gen, știri model. She is also committed to ensuring that the Gen, știri and Gen Zette teams recruit younger Gen Alpha colleagues to mentor and integrate them in the team when the time comes. Diana plans to engage more of her colleagues to host more Caravan conversations, and she eventually wants to invite older Romanians to the conversations to build mentorship opportunities, intergenerational understanding, and shared allegiance to civic stewardship and democratic action.
Méně