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Children's Express: The News From the Kids' Point of View
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12784 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
2,478 Words |
| Author
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Paula R. Steen
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Thirteen-year-old Albert Lin was cross. "Some adults treat us like three-year-olds."
He has a right to complain. The young reporters and editors at Children's Express (CE) have proven they are as capable as adults. In 1976 the children's news bureau scooped the "grown-up" media with the story that Mondale would be named Carter's running mate. In 1981 they were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for their story on children in the Cambodian refugee camps. Credentials like that show the kids at CE can be taken seriously.
"Kids don't have to sit around and wait," sixteen-year-old editor Rebecca Walkowitz insists. "We can investigate and publicize children's issues and we can learn a lot by doing it."
Children's Express publisher and founder Robert Clampitt agrees. "Children can take responsibility. You just have to give them as much as they can handle."
When he started CE in New York in 1975, Clampitt intended to publish a children's magazine with articles on topics like hang gliders and canoeing.
"Those are subjects that adults typically think kids are interested in," he recalled as he leaned back in the bureau's Greenwich Village offices.
"I planned to make CE different," he explained, "in that kids would writ and edit the articles. At the beginning, there was a tiny staff of me and two other adults and about fourteen kids, the oldest of whom was thirteen."
But Clampitt had underestimated his young staff.
"In one assignment, the kids invented a whole new publication."
That assignment was the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York.
"I got the kids pre-convention passes so they could interview the telephone installers, carpenters, and vendors, and write an article on how a political convention is put together."
What Clampitt didn't know was that top political and media people spend time on the floor before the convention. Clampitt's young reporters ignored the workers and interviewed the decision makers instead, with the result that CE was the first media organ to report that Mondale would be chosen as Carter's running mate. They quoted Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, explaining why he had been "dumped" by President Gerald Ford, "I wasn't smart enough." And they publicized former Chicago mayor Richard Daley's statement that the 1968 convention riots in Chicago had been a media event that never really happened.
How did children manage to come up with information that adults had missed? Michael Schreibman, now the twenty-four-year-old Long Island bureau chief of WPIX television in New York, was one of CE's reporters at the 1976 convention.
"Politicians have a way of answering questions that adults just accept. But children won't always accept pat replies, and
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