Last week, we reported that the EuroMedia Awards would be handed out on Friday 15.10; by now, they have been, and the news that Vienna ’s Okto Community TV has won the EuroMedia Sponsorship Award 2010 on Migration & Integration is now all over the internet.

As denoted by its name, Okto is a „community TV“.  That is to say that it provides communities with the know-how and infrastructure to produce and project their own shows on topics that interest them. Indeed, the list of Okto broadcasts boasts a large number of shows targeting Viennese minorities, such as Latino TV, Afrika TV, Ex-Yu in Wien (ex-Yugoslavia in Vienna ).

In specific terms, the show that won Okto this award is called Project X-Change, possibly because it addresses Generation-X. That is to say, it addresses the new generation of Viennese children, seeking answers to the matter of migration and integration not in the future, not the present. It is an approach that has much to recommend it, because children run as a pack, and remain less susceptible to the many xenophobic messages that can be broadcast on the mainstream media. If integration is possible for children, it must also be possible to strip away the layers of mistrust between adults, or at least to allow these children to grow up without being affected by them.

And of course, there is another layer, which was addressed in the laudation speech: „But Project X-change goes a step further than that, as it includes the young people, – lots of them themselves with a migrant background -  into the whole process of television making. In the very sense of civic journalism, Project X-change – by that – views their audiences as participants, empowering them for the information society“. The word empowering is significant, because to be empowered or to be in power, generally stops people from ceding to fatalism, depression, and in this context, its consequences: fear of the unknown, which is also fear of the stranger and the foreigner.

Being the next generation entails a wealth of responsibilities for our migration and integration policies. In giving youngsters the opportunity to face up to this responsibility, Okto in essence offers them the potential to communicate, just as the ECo-C does in its own field.

Pictured: Snapshots from the award Ceremony.

For related information, please also see www.okto.tv and www.euromediaawards.eu