July 19, 2004

Three members of the CPL convention team explain their jobs and the process that got them credentialed to be on the floor of the Fleet center in Boston.

Children's PressLine recently snagged an interview with Senator Hillary Clinton.

Our main goal is to inform as many people as we can about kids’ issues. Adults don't always know or care what kids think or how they feel. Through CPL we have a chance to tell them.

It’s not good that adults don’t know a lot about kids’ issues. It’s good for kids to express their opinions and experiences and it’s good for adults to listen to us.

Defining the Issues
In November, a team of reporters and editors sat down together and reviewed the stories CPL has published during the past few years. We put together a list of 12 issues that we’ve covered extensively. We added to that a brainstormed list of ideas that also affected our friends and ourselves. By then we had nearly 20 issues of national importance that affected people under the age of 18.

We wanted topics or issues that affected kids but that not a lot of people knew about. We wanted things that would motivate adults to create change or inspire society to do something. We could have surveyed people in the community, but we didn't do that because we thought that our friends would overlook some important issues. We didn’t pick some big grown-up issue that kids don't care about. We wanted issues that we would be passionate about, and that our readers would be drawn to once they read about how the situation affects kids.

The list included things like asthma, teen unemployment and obesity. For the next two weeks, we researched statistics and resources. Then came the hard part: cutting it down. One Sunday we had a bureau-wide meeting with kids and staff. The political team – made up of three editors and two reporters – took turns pitching the issues to the group at the office. Everyone rated each issue on a scale of 1 to 5 (One: “not interested in this,” Five: “really interested in it.”). At the end we tallied up the score and averaged the points. It was sort of like a Miss U.S.A. Pageant with finalists and semi-finalists.

We decided the top seven would be the issues we’d focus on from January to June. (July we’d begin preparing for the Democratic Convention coverage). By the end of that meeting in December, we had picked seven topics: homeless kids; kids on death row; uninsured kids; the No Child Left Behind education act; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth rights; kids in overseas sweatshops and the education of disabled kids.

In June, we decided to drop kids in sweatshops (focusing our coverage on national issues) and to fold the education of disabled kids into the NCLB topic.

Educating Ourselves – and Adults
So between January and June every kid in the bureau – as many as 70 -- worked on an issue-based team. Each team met once a week to brainstorm, discuss news developments, brief for an interview or conduct an interview.

The Uninsured Kids team interviewed teen moms without health insurance, immigrant youth who used alternative medicine and teens who must act as interpreters for their non-English-speaking parents at the hospital. The Homeless Kids team talked to runaways, homeless teens with depression and children in a Serbian orphanage. The Death Row team interviewed two juvenile offenders on death row, young death row activists, and teen offenders in a community custody program. These interviews were recorded, transcribed, edited and published for adult readers.

The two teams that were the most popular with the kids were death row and homeless kids. Death row is an intense topic – and it can be very scary for kids. Homelessness is a powerful issue, too. When a kid's homeless, it has a big effect on his or her future. You almost don't have a future. Or if you do, it might not be such a good one. That could change if someone started paying attention to these kids. The government spends so much money on other unnecessary things, like building a sports stadium, when they could be putting homeless people in houses.

We did a story about a girl who used to be in a foster home because her mother and father were taking drugs and had dangerous weapons in the house. She says her foster parents were even worse to her so she left when she was 15.

Another team interviewed a young lesbian, teen bisexuals and a transgender boy. Some of us didn’t know that LGBT kids got picked on in school – or even what a transgender person was. By publishing the interviews, we let more people know about what they go through every day. In our school, being called “gay” is big insult. We are not big on that. We bet a lot of people don’t understand what it’s like to be gay.

We’ve made many mistakes in our lives, but relying on our ignorance isn't one of them. If we don't know something we’ll try to find it out, and if someone's stopping us from finding it out that means trouble!

How We Work
Before any interview we conduct a briefing. These sessions are led by the editors and help the reporters get all the background on the stories. This is also when the reporters write their questions for the interview. It’s up to us to come up with interesting ways of forming 20 questions for each interview. Sometimes we include quotations or statistics before the questions, as a form of evidence on a certain topic. After the interview we debrief. These are also really important because they help us learn what to do in the future or what not to do.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been briefing to cover the Democratic Convention. Instead of editors leading the briefings, experts in the fields of journalism and politics have been talking to us. We've talked a lot about what’s happened to children's issues. We ask everyone why the government ignores children when they set their political agendas. There must be a better answer than, “Because kids can’t vote.”

No Vote, but a Voice
We think kids should be able to vote. A group of kids in California are trying to give 16-year-olds a half of a vote; 14-year-olds would get one-quarter of a vote. We think younger children should be able to vote too. Ten-year-olds. Maybe ten 10-year-olds would equal one grown-up vote. Then kids would have some power.

But, as it is now, because we don't vote, the people in the government ignore us, and we can't do anything.

We are excited that we have some voice through our work at Children’s PressLine. It makes us feel better about not being able to vote. It’s cool that we can advocate for the 26 percent of the U.S. population that is too young to vote. We’ll use our credentials to ask the questions they would ask.

We’re Ready
The hardest thing about reporting is that it is a lot of work. And sometimes we get nervous. But before every interview, we always get a rush of adrenaline that kicks in.

Before we go to Boston for the Democratic Convention we will have come up with a bunch of different questions for different politicians, based on who we find on the convention floor and at the other events. When we find who we want, we will go for it. We’ll run after them and ask our questions. If they just start reciting a stump speech, we know to tell the politician, "Well, I don't understand, can you explain it to me in a different way?" or "How specifically can you solve this?" We want to make them promise to fix the situation. We want to know exactly how they would help kids out in that situation.

We know we won’t be the only journalists there. There’ll be like 50,000 other reporters trying to get them too. But we have a plan: We’ll sneak under their feet. We won’t trip or hurt them. (At past political events we’ve been hit in the head a couple of times with video cameras. Ouch!) Because we are small and because we’re kids, politicians will be more open to talking. We won’t be surprised if we hear a lot of other reporters complaining, "Oh, I can't believe I lost another interview to those kids!"

We’ll have to fight our way through to get an interview. But don’t worry, we’ll get them.

Connect for Kids will be publishing photos and a reporter’s notebook from the Children’s PressLine journalists during the weeks of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. In September, we’ll host some of CPL’s seasoned political reporters for an on-line chat about their experiences.

Resources

• Learn more about Children’s PressLine