“Out of the Mouths of Babes and Experts”: Children’s news and what it can teach us about news access and professional mediation
JULIAN MATTHEWS Bath Spa University College, UK
Journalism Studies, Volume 6, Number 4, 2005, pp. 509  519

ABSTRACT: Based on a participant observation study of the British children’s news programme Newsround, this article explores how professional ideas of form and target audience condition and shape both the range of accessed news voices as well as the opportunities that these are granted on the news stage to elaborate their views, experiences and feelings. This case-study approach not only helps to map a hitherto unexplored form of television journalism but also throws into sharp relief professional news practices that inform the production of television news more generally. As such, it addresses an important silence in the conventional theorization of news access and invites a more complex and culturally differentiated understanding of, and future approach to, news production and processes of professional mediation.