How Mobile Stories Teaches Gen Z to Trust News by Making Them Producers

Nearly half of young Swedes believe the media actively lies to them. In the U.S., that number is 80%. These aren't fringe conspiracy theorists - they're the generation that news organizations desperately need as their older audiences age out.

For the past decade, a small Swedish nonprofit has been running an experiment: Instead of teaching young people about journalism, make them do it - with professional-grade editorial guardrails built into the workflow. Last week, I talked to the founders Lotta Bergseth, Jenny Sköld, and Johan Glimskög on a Zoom call. They explained to me the functions, achievements, limitations and future plans of Mobile Stories.

Mobile Stories is a publishing tool used in schools across Sweden and, more recently, in Finland, Ireland, and Romania. Students age 12-19 produce real articles, videos, and podcasts that go through a structured editorial process before publication.

The workflow mimics a professional newsroom: Peer review is mandatory, teachers function as editors who must approve content before publication, and the platform surfaces guidance on source verification, ethics, and copyright at decision points throughout the process. A meerkat as a bot called Trusty - currently rules-based, with an agentic version in development - acts as a mentor, nudging students toward better practices without writing for them.

The results after 10 years with Mobiles Stories: More than 13,000 students, 9,000+ published articles, and survey data showing 85% of participants improved their media literacy, according to their teachers. Perhaps more telling: 90% of teachers said the tool was genuinely engaging for their students.

Mobile Stories gave me a test account. The interface I played around with resembles a simple but modern CMS with some of the core functions professional newsrooms have access to. What impressed me most were the peer review workflow and the need for students to not just link to and list sources but argue why they are relevant and trustworthy. (Here’s a walk-though of the core functions in a 15-minute explainer video for students.)

Mobile Stories is no longer a purely Swedish initiative. Through ProMS (Promoting Media Literacy and Youth Citizen Journalism through Mobile Stories), an EU-funded project that concluded in 2024, the platform has been translated into English, Finnish, and Romanian, with pilots running in schools across Ireland, Finland, and Romania.

The consortium behind this expansion includes News Decoder (a France-based global educational news service), Media & Learning Association in Belgium, Dublin City University's Institute for Future Media, and academic partners at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organizations focused on transparency standards, collaborated on developing the youth reporters' code of ethics.

"In an age of disinformation, media literacy is essential for young people to be informed citizens," said Chloé Pété of Media & Learning. "The ProMS project is a timely and important initiative that will empower youth to produce and consume digital media responsibly and critically."

The international version targets B2 English learners (the upper-intermediate level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages [CEFR] scale for English proficiency), making it accessible to students learning English as a second language across Europe. This addresses a gap: Most youth journalism programs are either US-centric or operate within single national contexts. Mobile Stories is attempting something more ambitious - a cross-border platform where students from different countries can potentially collaborate on stories.

Jenny Sköld, co-founder of Mobile Stories, acknowledged that cultural translation isn't straightforward. In Sweden, the platform teaches "source trust" - the idea that while you shouldn't trust media blindly, quality journalism follows standards worth understanding. "That's a bit difficult to translate to a Bulgarian context, for example, and even a Romanian context where journalists and the media don't have that many resources and maybe not high standards ethically," she said. The team is navigating how to teach journalism ethics in countries where press freedom and professional standards vary significantly.

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Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier now partners with Mobile Stories on the Young Journalist Award, a competition connecting student journalists with local newsrooms across the country. Winners get visits to professional news outlets - and editors get direct exposure to how young people think about news.

"They don't have so much time and resources to work with young people," co-founder Jenny Sköld told me. "But they are impressed, and they think it's good that we are there for them."

The underlying pitch to legacy media: Mobile Stories has spent a decade learning what makes journalism resonate with the generation currently abandoning traditional news. That institutional knowledge - what topics engage them, how they evaluate credibility, what formats work - is valuable intelligence for newsrooms struggling to rebuild trust with younger audiences.

Mobile Stories has taken a deliberately restrained approach to AI. The platform doesn't generate content. Students can't use it to write their articles. AI's role is strictly supportive: amplifying teachers and mentors, not replacing editorial judgment.

The team has developed concrete AI ethics guidelines in partnership with News Decoder and the Trust Project. Students must disclose any AI use in their articles - for research, grammar checks, or image generation - with specific language about what tools they used and how they verified the output. AI-generated images require explicit labeling and cannot depict realistic scenes that might mislead readers.

"We really would like to develop more guides regarding how to prompt and how to do journalistic research with AI," Sköld acknowledged. "That's something that we would like to do but haven't done yet."

What's on the roadmap: an agentic version of Trusty that can provide tailored feedback on student writing, a "liquid content" system that tracks how stories evolve and spread across platforms, and a certification mechanism to verify that content was produced using journalistic methods. The team is honest that most of this remains in development - they're a three-person core team working largely on grant funding.

Mobile Stories didn't emerge in a vacuum. Youth journalism education has a long history, and understanding where Mobile Stories fits helps clarify what's genuinely new.

The print era approach: Germany's "Zeitung in der Schule" (Newspaper in School) has run for over 40 years, with regional papers like the Stuttgarter Zeitung delivering physical newspapers to classrooms. The US equivalent, Newspapers in Education (NIE), operates in more than 80 countries according to WAN-IFRA, the global newspaper publishers' association. These programs teach students to read and analyze news - the newspaper as "living textbook." But they're fundamentally consumption-focused, and they depend on print infrastructure that's rapidly disappearing.

Newer media literacy programs : The News Literacy Project in the U.S. has emerged as a major force, with its Checkology e-learning platform teaching students to spot misinformation and evaluate sources. NLP is pushing for news literacy requirements in all 50 U.S. states. In New York City, the Youth Journalism Coalition is working to bring journalism courses to all 500 public high schools - currently, only about 1% of NYC high school students have access to journalism coursework.

Production instead of mere consumption: CalMatters' Youth Journalism Initiative in California and CUNY's Journalism for All program represent newer efforts that, like Mobile Stories, emphasize producing journalism rather than just consuming it. These programs place students in newsrooms, pair them with mentors, and publish their work.

What distinguishes Mobile Stories is the attempt to systematize the production process itself. Rather than relying on individual mentorship or journalism club advisors, the platform embeds editorial workflow - peer review, source verification prompts, ethics checkpoints, editorial approval - into the software. This makes it more scalable and less dependent on having experienced journalism teachers.

It's also built mobile-first for a generation that doesn't read print newspapers and may never subscribe to one. The irony: teaching journalism ethics through the same devices that deliver most misinformation.

Mobile Stories reaches Gen Z through schools and teachers, not directly. That's a specific channel - not a universal playbook for audience development. The commercial arm is tiny (roughly 10-12 paid subscriptions). The model depends heavily on foundation support from Google.org and EU grants.

And the fundamental tension remains unresolved: Students learn rigorous verification practices inside the platform, then go home to a media environment where AI-generated content is everywhere and the incentives reward speed over accuracy.

But that tension may be precisely the point. In a media landscape where trust is collapsing, Mobile Stories is betting that the solution isn't better algorithms or slicker distribution but giving young people firsthand experience with why editorial standards exist in the first place.