If you’ve seen the movie “Philadelphia”, you probably remember Denzel’s trademark line: “Explain it to me like I’m a six-year-old.” Sounds easy enough, but we dare you to try it. Go ahead, flip through today’s newspaper, pick out a few big stories, and try to translate news-speak into kid-speak. Not such an easy task, is it?
Maybe that’s why the Washington Post is the only major newspaper to take on such a task on a daily basis. Five years ago, the Post started up KidsPost, which provides news, trivia and games aimed at children ages 8-13. We’re a little too old here at CJR Daily to remember KidsPost as part of our childhood. But yesterday, after tuning in to a little online Q&A with KidsPost editor Tracy Grant, we decided to check in on what KidsPost has been up to recently.
A lot of the news stories are what you would expect — pieces centered on kids or animals or scooters or Disneyland.
But KidsPost doesn’t shy away from tackling bigger issues. And when they do, their evident commitment to providing context and definition often yields clearer and more thorough stories than you’d find in the A section. In fact, in the Q&A yesterday, one reader told Grant that “During the Election 2000 mess, I gave up trying to understand the complexities of the count, recount, electoral college [in] the A section and began reading KidsPost. You continually had the clearest explanation possible of what was going on, without the political rhetoric (or ‘snippiness’) from both sides. Now I glance at it daily and often learn a thing or two.”
In the last few weeks, KidsPost ran a piece on the Senate’s apology for lynching and an update on the filibuster debacle. And last month they brought kids news about Terry Schiavo’s death and of the ongoing violence in Iraq.
What’s impressive about these stories is that the writers manage to convey what the news is, what it means in context, and why it’s important — and they do it in just 100 to 200 words!
So we’d like to thank you, people of KidsPost. By weaning young readers on good journalism, you just may produce a generation of readers who know to demand context and clarity from their news sources. Already, too many newspapers get away with not answering that demand.
Now, could you guys do us a favor and run an article on Social Security?
If you can manage to distill that monster to 100 words that an eight-year-old — hell, that a 40-year-old — would understand, you’ll be doing far more than most of the big-boy papers out there.
–Samantha Henig
Samantha Henig was a CJR Daily intern.