My Dream Interview: If you’re 11-15 years old, this contest is for you

Inquirer in Education (IIE) has been invited to send entries to My Dream Interview, a festival of success stories in youth journalism, which will culminate in Madrid, Spain, in October.

Launched by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers-Ifra (WAN-IFRA), in cooperation with Acindar Foundation, the My Dream Interview (MDI) project is meant to teach young people the value of dedication and hard work and, at the same time, equip them with interview and language skills.

To find the Philippine representatives to this search, the Inquirer is holding a nationwide contest among preteen and teenage Filipino students. Teachers are invited to coach their students and win prizes.

The contest is open to teams of four Filipino students aged 11 to 15 years and enrolled in the same public or private school in the Philippines.

Each team must have one coach, who is a teacher in the same school. The coach shall guide the students in the preparation of the group’s entry.

Each school may be represented by only one team.

IIE will also be conducting a series of workshops on the art of the interview. Aspiring journalists aged 11 to 15 will be taught how to conduct journalistic interviews, including skills on researching, careful verification, fact-checking and smart question construction.

For specific venues, look for the MDI ads and announcements in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (print version) in the following weeks.

Students in each team should choose a prominent person they would like to interview.

The interviewee may be in public service (government, NGO, human rights), arts, media, entertainment, sports or any field, and must have achieved prominence and/or success through hard work.

Each team will submit the name of its dream interviewee, along with a written set of questions (in English) to the Inquirer.

The Inquirer will choose the 10 best sets of questions as finalists. The newspaper will also help the winning teams secure an appointment with their dream interviewees if needed.

The finalists will then proceed to interview the persons they have chosen as subjects.

After the interview, each team will use the Q&A material to write a feature story in English on the person interviewed.

The resulting stories will be submitted to the Inquirer where editors will select two winners.

Both winning interview stories will be sent to WAN-IFRA in Paris where international judges will select two global winners from among the “dream interviews” submitted by participating countries.

The two teams adjudged as winners by the global newspaper association will be awarded at the IFRA expo on October 29-31 in Madrid, Spain.

Complete mechanics for the MDI contest will be made available online and in this section in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, form your teams, get a teacher to be your coach, read the guide, think about who you want to interview and start dreaming about making it to Madrid. Olé!