Media Labs by New East

The Media Lab program was born a decade ago—not as a trend, but as an act of resistance.

In the aftermath of 2015, as waves of disinformation surged across our borderlands, we understood that silence was complicity. What began as a local initiative in Latgale soon became a long-term educational architecture—a decentralized network of learning spaces designed to confront propaganda, nurture media literacy, and build resilience in vulnerable communities through knowledge, play, and solidarity.

Over ten years, Media Labs by New East has grown into a transnational framework for non-formal media education. We have curated and delivered over 60 labs and interventions for more than 3,000 participants—from seven-year-olds in our Media Lab Junior sessions to nonagenarians 90 years old participants shaping narratives in our Skills Laboratory for Seniors. Our methodology is hybrid, combining journalism, game-based learning, simulation, group psychology, and storytelling, tailored to meet the needs of different generations and social contexts.

Media Labs have taken shape in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova, the Czech Republic, and beyond. They appear as hackathons, international conferences, thematic camps, or closed training formats—each time responding to the specific dynamics of the place, the people, and the political atmosphere. We gather journalists, fact-checkers, media professionals, human rights activists, educators, and artists, not as instructors, but as co-participants in a temporary autonomous zone of critical learning.

The labs are not static. They are living, breathing, and constantly evolving structures—resilient enough to shift between online and offline, agile enough to support youth, seniors, educators, or digital nomads, and bold enough to enter regions that others often bypass. Each Media Lab is both a place and a process—part seminar, part rehearsal, part urgent experiment in collective thinking.

From border towns to capital cities, Media Labs form a quiet counterforce. Not just to misinformation—but to cynicism, isolation, and learned helplessness.

This is not media training.

This is resistance through education.

And it continues.