The news at nine
- 29 Aug 06, 01:13 PM
What were you doing when you were nine years old? And, more to the point, what was going on in the world that year?
It's quite a sobering exercise. Look up the year when you were nine on Wikipedia (mine was ) and you'll probably be surprised how much you don't recall from the news. All I think I was aware of was the World Cup (Archie Gemmill's goal), two Popes dying in close succession and suspicious circumstances, Georgi Markov being poisoned in London by an umbrella (a real-life spy story!) and, weirdly, the Times newspaper strike.
Whereas, I remember far more clearly what I did on my summer holiday, who my primary school teacher was, and the trauma of my favourite pet dying.
I ask because Newsround has a new target audience, and it's a slightly younger one than before. As part of the 大象传媒's Creative Future review , there will be a new teen brand, which will aim at, um, teenagers. Which allows C大象传媒 and all the 大象传媒's "children's" output to focus clearly and fully on the primary school audience.
It's a shift for us. In the past, Newsround has catered for a slightly older eight to 12-year-old age range - going into the first two years of secondary school. So focusing is a bit of a challenge.
But we're up for challenges. From today, regular Newsround viewers and readers will notice some differences.
We are using larger pictures on the stories on the and a larger text size on our TV bulletins. Our round-up of 20-second stories on our TV bulletins will be chosen on the strength of the pictures, rather than including stories which are "important" but visually dull (no more court arrivals). We are aiming to use simpler language in the first four sentences of our web stories, on the basis that that's the right amount for children who are slower at reading.
And will be focusing ever more on stories that are relevant and interesting to nine-year-olds: stories about their lives, about other children in the UK and around the world. So behind-the-scenes, we have a new newsroom structure which should improve our forward planning, making richer, more proactive and more investigative.
It means that Newsround will probably cover fewer of the hard political stories that make it into the Wikipedia summaries of the year. But it might also mean that, thanks to our research, we break more stories about children's lives that seep into the national agenda.
Tim Levell is editor of Newsround
