Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) this week officially launched the website for the Children’s News Agency (CNA) as part of its initiative to ensure that children have a voice in the media. Flow Communications had the privilege of creating the new website for MMA.
Flow managing director Tiffany Turkington-Palmer says: “As a company that holds writing and journalism very close to its heart, we at Flow are inspired by the MMA’s initiative to get children involved in writing about the issues that surround them. The MMA has been a client of Flow’s for over five years and we are continually encouraged by its commitment and dedication in finding new ways to change the news and reporting industry for the better.”
The launch of CNA coincided with the release of the results of a study that MMA undertook, on the amount of coverage of children in the media. It discovered that only 12% of news stories mention children, yet children account for 39% of our population. The research that the MMA undertook is part of a broader project, “Children and the Media: Championing Best Practice”, which seeks to rectify the imbalance of reporting on and by children in the media.
Designer Ryan Levenson says of the project: “It’s an exciting platform. It gives young writers the chance to get noticed by major news publications, and for the news agencies it’s a unique resource for finding insight into the youth of our country.”
The CNA does not only provide children with the opportunity to have their stories recognised and published, it also expands their skills. Child journalists are taught the processes involved in creating news by qualified MMA journalists, and how to apply these processes to tell their own stories.
Flow developer Alex Cowling says: “I had to develop the Children’s News Agency website while being aware that children and adults were going to be using it. It had to be intuitive and provide support along the way. It was quite satisfying to work on such an empowering campaign; I hope it gives child writers the platform they need to have their voices heard.”
And so far, the site has definitely achieved this.
Although the site Flow created for the CNA was officially launched on 18 July, it has been live for about a year, during which more than 20 articles written by the CNA’s child journalists have been published in mainstream print media.