For Miomir Rajcevic and his pack of Roaming Reporters, the open range this summer is Athens, home of the Olympic Games and Agora 2004, an annual Mediterranean summit on youth media.

This is the third year the Roaming Reporters organization, a project of Athens' European Children's Television Centre (ECTC), is attending Agora, but this year the event coincides with the return of the Olympics to Greece. As a result, the group's international youth reporters — ages 14 to 18 — are focusing much of their attention on sports at the conference from June 18 to 21. Rajcevic, the coordinator of the program, anticipates that the young participants will report from the games, as well.

But for Rajcevic, the most important subject of the Roaming Reporters' workshops is not the Olympics, but the critical communication skills the young people are learning while having a good time. Rajcevic — a veteran shooter who has experience working with youth through the ECTC and the Media Education Centre in Serbia and Montenegro — says the language of visual images is the perfect way for children from disparate backgrounds to transcend cultural barriers.

“The youth of Europe have different traditional, cultural, and religious backgrounds,” he says. “They need some means of communication to enable them to get better knowledge of each other. That will lead to better understanding as a basic foundation for life without conflicts with neighbors and other nationalities in Europe — peaceful and creative cooperation in all fields of life.”

At the Agora workshops, Rajcevic says he is careful to reach out to all attending youth, especially those coming from former communist countries, where media access is still limited. “[They] need media literacy even more than children from developed countries. They still live in very low life-standard conditions, and digital equipment, computers, and the Internet are only a dream for a lot of them,” he says.

This year, the Roaming Reporters are focusing on classical animation, documentary production, and newsgathering, in addition to presenting the results of a special “e-learning” project through which youth in Austria, Greece, and Italy collaborate online to report on the themes of sports, cinema, and historical memory. Roaming Reporters' participants will also begin work on another collaborative project this summer at the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy. The project, a film called Chain, is being produced in a step-by-step manner by children across the world and will debut at Agora 2005.

Professionals from world broadcasting companies, film institutes, and media education organizations are teaching the workshops using Sony DCR-TRV and DSR-PD camcorders, Panasonic NV-DS29 and NV-DS30 camcorders, Sony Mavica digital still cameras, and Apple Macintosh and PC computers outfitted with Adobe Premiere.

The daily reports created during Agora are being disseminated on the Web, as well as through European media networks participating in the conference, according to Rajcevic, who notes that the Roaming Reporters have quickly become the voice of the conference.

Rajcevic says that while it is challenging to organize international children's television crews in only four days, the biggest challenge is helping the young people gain the critical skills and awareness they will need to influence the media — perhaps the greatest open range of all. But he's optimistic.

“We are sure we will help the youngsters to learn the new Internet communication technologies and become clever users,” he says. “That is how they will adapt the media space, which belongs to them, to their own needs. And they will be able to use it to exchange ideas; work together on projects; better understand the value of the multicultural, multi-traditional, and multi-confessional world; and create a foundation for a peaceful, quality, and prosperous future for us all.”

For more information on Roaming Reporters and the Agora 2004 conference, visit www.videosystems.com for a link.