School editors with American journalist Stephanie Siek (middle)

Seminar for School Newspaper Editors
June 26 and 27, 2009. The U.S. Consulate General Frankfurt joined forces with the Atlantic Academy Rhineland-Palatinate and the Fridtjof-Nansen-Academy Ingelheim in organizing, for the first time, a two-day seminar for school newspaper editors from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate at the Atlantic Academy in Kaiserslautern. Conducted in German and English, the seminar on “’All the News That’s Fit to Print’: The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age” attracted 20 high school students who listened to and discussed presentations by Thomas Moorstedt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Dr. Holger Schmidt, Faz.Net and Stephanie Siek, an American journalist formerly with AP and the Boston Globe and now working for Spiegel-Online.  Exclusively writing for printed school newspapers, the 15-19 year-old editors learned about the crisis of print and the rise of online journalism in the United States and Germany. They debated with the experts the differences as well as advantages and disadvantages of old-traditional versus online journalism and implications for their own current and future work.