Upper secondary school students to produce TikTok news for Länsiväylä city media: “This is an opportunity to influence things!”

Students of two upper secondary schools in Espoo, Kuninkaantien lukio and Matinkylän lukio, have an excellent opportunity to produce news content from young people’s point of view for the TikTok channel of the city magazine Länsiväylä. The idea of having upper secondary school students create TikTok news originated from a discussion between Senior Lecturer Antti Pelttari from Humak University of Applied Sciences, students Meira Palmio and Grace Kyanza, and Heli Koivuniniemi, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Länsiväylä. Länsiväylä has been collaborating with Humak for years.

Länsiväylä commissioned a thesis from Humak students because, as stated in the presentation of the thesis, “the media and newspapers would like young readers and are willing to reach young people. The challenge for the media houses is how to reach them”. Community education students Palmio and Kyanza completed a thesis together on the topic Making the voice of young people heard – media education for young people.

“The editorial team of Länsiväylä is interested in the life and thoughts of young people. Short-form videos have now rapidly become part of the daily work in the media. It is interesting to know on what kind of topics young people themselves make short-form videos for the media when they produce these videos with the support and guidance of the media and the students from Humak. By doing this, we can get closer to young people in a new way,” says Heli Koivuniemi, Editor-in-Chief at Länsiväylä. In the planning phase of the collaboration with upper secondary schools, Länsiväylä was represented by Editor-in-Chief Heli Koivuniemi and media group Keskisuomalainen by Producer Heini Pitkänen.

“This collaboration has been a very much needed new opening for us! Creating and developing an audience relationship between the media and young people is a shared, extremely important topic. Getting to know the journalists in the local media is a good first step in enabling upper secondary school students in Espoo to genuinely feel that Länsiväylä is their media,” says Pitkänen.

There is also a great need for cooperation between the media and young people in general: “It is important to highlight the voice of young people. Young people don't get enough information. In news coverage, other people speak on their behalf or few young people have an opportunity to make their voice heard. The news is also generalising,” says Grace Kyanza. 

Grace Kyanza completed a placement as a community educator at Matinkylän lukio upper secondary school, so it was easy to start collaboration with the school also in this project. Kuninkaantien lukio upper secondary school was selected as the other upper secondary school. The six students from Kuninkaantien lukio participating in the Länsiväylä collaboration are from the school’s TikTok team and social media team. The ten or so students from Matinkylän lukio in turn are from the school’s communications team.

Nella Hakkarainen and Aino Ahola from Kuninkaantien lukio are interested in journalism as a future career, which is why they were happy to join the project. “It was nice to try something new,” says Sofia Tiitinen. “I haven’t made short-form videos before, so I was interested in starting to make them,” Vanesa Kovalevko sums up.

Iini Lindström from Kuninkaantie felt that making TikTok news was a good opportunity to make a concrete impact. Peppi Pursiainen from Matinkylän lukio agreed: “I took part in this project because it was an opportunity to influence things – what people know about young people’s matters, from young people to young people.”

In the project, the young people were indeed able to provide their own perspective and bring up their ideas. “In this project, we could show what we would like to see in the news ourselves,” says Emilia Nylund.

Young people are often not spoken about very nicely in the media: “Young people are belittled in the media,” says Alice Nykänen. Nella Hakkarainen from Kuninkaantien lukio has also noticed generalisation. “They talk about the trends of young people, but I have never heard of them myself,” Nella says. Aino Ahola from the same upper secondary school also talks about the negativeness of the news: "The news about young people is always negative. I don't feel that I am so bad myself." 

Two workshops were held for the students: Humak students Grace and Meira held a participatory media education workshop in which the TikToks to be created were brainstormed and material was collected for their thesis. In the workshop held by the students, the participants discussed matters such as where young people find news, what would make them stop to have a closer look at a news item, what topics should be more visible or what adults should know more about in the world of young people. “In-depth topics emerged in the workshop,” Grace and Meira say. The workshop also revealed that young people would like to read news in newpapers and magazines if they were available, for example, on the tables of the school canteen.

“Everyone was able to influence matters in the workshop,” says Medina Zeqiri, a student of Matinkylän lukio upper secondary school.

All students of Matinkylän lukio praise the workshop with the students of Kuninkaantien lukio. “They had wise thoughts and good points of view that I had not thought of myself,” says Alice Nykänen. The students of Kuninkaantien lukio also praise the Matinkylä students: "They came up with new perspectives."

Producer Heini Pitkänen trained the students to create TikTok news and, together with them, brainstormed ideas for the topics that would finally be made into videos. “During the journalistic workshop, I went through the most important sections from the Journalist’s Guidelines, the “checklist” for making news stories, and a brief overview of journalistic short-form videos. At the concrete level, I talked to them about video scriptwriting and about filming and editing video clips,” Pitkänen says. “However, I must say that, especially the technical matters were familiar or even self-explanatory to a majority of the participants, as young people have grown up with short-form videos,” Pitkänen continues, praising the participants.

“In the training, we went through things that I had not paid attention to before. For example, TikTok news can be made in different ways and different types of videos have deliberately been made,” says Aino from Kuninkaantien lukio. The students from Kuninkaantien lukio noted that Heini Pitkänen was very familiar with the subject of the training.

Both upper secondary schools will publish one news item on Länsiväylä’s TikTok during April. Kuninkaantien lukio will make a TikTok news video about the seniors’ ball. Their upper secondary school organises ‘dances without a specific partner’, which means that the students do not dance all dances with the same partner and they cannot choose their dance partner. The practice is partly due to the curriculum that entered into force in 2021. At Kuninkaantie lukio, the Wanhojen tanssit course deepens especially the skills and knowledge that are part of social functional capacity. However, many students would like to dance with a specific partner.

“In our TikTok news video, we are going to interview the current first-year students on this topic. Students have also received a survey on the seniors’ ball, and we can also use the survey material in our news item,” the students say.

Matinkylän lukio will conduct interviews with artists: “We want to ask young top artists how they have made their careers, how they have reached the top and what tips they have for those who dream of a career as an artist. We also want to know how they found the courage to start to pursue a career,” the students from Matinkylä say. Messages have been sent to top artists through the school’s Instagram account.

“In the workshop organised by me, we went through the ideas for the topics of the videos together, and I shared my own thoughts on what should be taken into account in them and how a broader topic could be looked at from a point of view that is suitable at this very moment,” Heini Pitkänen explains.

“The students are allowed to make a TikTok news item on a topic that they are interested in. The media reserves the right to decide on its publication,” says Heli Koivuniemi, Editor-in-Chief of Länsiväylä.

The cooperation seems to be going well. "This was a more successful project than I could expect. The feedback I have heard so far has been encouraging. The reception in the upper secondary schools was positive from the beginning, and in that atmosphere, I found it encouraging to start experimenting with something new,” Koivuniemi says.

The intention is to continue the cooperation between upper secondary schools and Länsiväylä, and the aim is to also involve new upper secondary schools. The project created a concept that can also be duplicated for other media to use. In the future, cooperation between the media and young people does not need to be only with upper secondary schools, but could also include young people from comprehensive schools, for example.

“The media operators in Finland can no longer concentrate merely on everyday life of their familiar middle-aged and middle-class readers. Instead, we need to continuously develop new solutions for how we can genuinely engage young people,” Heini Pitkänen points out.

At Länsiväylä, short-form videos are produced by journalists and a photojournalist. The journalists have been making videos for only about six months. “All our journalists who produce short-form videos were trained in this new form of content during autumn 2025. The value of short-form videos in reaching young people has been understood. TikTok has also provided good insights. For example, by reading comments in TikTok you can get an idea of what kind of points of view young people might find interesting in familiar topics,” Heini Pitkänen says.