About Lewnah
Lewnah is a production company run by Lewis Vaughan Jones and his wife Hannah. Both Lewis and Hannah are newsreaders, for CNN and BBC respectively. When they’re not on air or working on stories for others, they carry out consultancy and projects around news and media for their company.
When COVID was in full swing, we noticed lots of parents having conversations with their kids, trying to explain to them about the germs outside and why they can't see their friends. It was a clear example of a news story that younger kids couldn't avoid, which is relatively unusual. With children accessing smartphones, social media and digital connectivity at increasingly younger ages, they are being exposed to the news, whether they and their parents like it or not.
Hannah made regular video blogs for her six-year-old goddaughter, sharing simplified explanations to help her understand what was going on in the pandemic. They were just videos of Hannah talking to the camera, nothing fancy, but they formed the seed that grew into our Clwstwr journey.
With our journalistic backgrounds, we considered the gap in children's news.
We wanted to look at how one could go about providing a news service that is age-appropriate and psychologically-appropriate for young kids. Newsround is amazing at what it does, but it's generally watched by those aged eight and over. We wanted to focus on kids who are just about to start primary school or are already there, so from 4-7 years old.
We came up with an idea, not knowing if it’d be feasible or not.
Our idea was to combine what young kids actually watch (cartoons and wacky, fun storylines) with what we do, i.e. TV news with pictures. We thought it could be a programme that blends the footage you’d see on the evening news with a cast of children's characters who’d tell the story in a fun, entertaining and informative way.
We put our two main questions to Clwstwr, hoping they’d fund us to research the answers.
The first question was an ethical, psychological one: is it right to even try to give news to 4-7 year olds?
The second was more technical: would it be possible to combine news footage with an animated character world, particularly when under tight time constraints? Fortunately, Clwstwr decided to give us the funding we needed to start looking for answers. We split our research into two phases to reflect the two major questions.
We started phase one by asking experts about the psychological effect of news on children.
To get an academic basis for our research, we wanted to conduct our own interviews and surveys with experts. We gathered psychologists and academics from around the world to ask them whether there are any issues around children accessing the news. Wonderfully, they thought there was no fundamental reason why there couldn't be a news service for that age group. More than that, some of them were very enthusiastic about the idea of having one. That was a big sigh of relief; it meant we could carry on and gave us a big spurt of enthusiasm.
Next, we surveyed primary school teachers and others involved in educating children.
We wanted to know how they speak to children about big news events and what resources they use to do so. We asked them what the appropriate language to use was, because a lot of this is about context and framing. The language you use and the context in which you put things to try and explain things is really important for kids. Teachers have a huge responsibility and lots of experience in exactly this area, so we got loads of really interesting feedback about how they broach the news.
One of the interesting findings was the amount of time they spent in class answering questions from the kids who’d heard something from the news. We got a real sense from that age group that we wouldn't be doing something uncomfortable, as in we wouldn't be bringing in these questions and these news topics to an age group that doesn't already talk about them. We didn’t want to be exposing children to news for the first time. Now we know we won’t be.
The third thing we did was speak to parents about what programmes their kids watch.
We've got a whole list of great TV programmes, most of which had nothing to do with the news or current affairs, and we learnt more about children’s viewing habits. We wanted to find out what would encourage co-viewing of a programme, because we want our show to be watched by parents and their children together. The parents told us that they loved to genuinely learn something from a programme. Also, they said they liked co-viewing the programmes that have funny lines in there for adults, not just the kids - shows where the scriptwriters intentionally have jokes aimed at the parents that the kids will never get. We hadn't even considered that at all.
The second phase of research focused on the technical side of creating the show.
By this point, we knew we wanted to create a show that can actually deliver the news in a really fun and entertaining way that combines animation with news footage. We had lots of conversations about how to combine the two. We liked the idea of having the middle third of the show being news footage, with cartoon characters interacting with it in a fun but sensitive way.
We took this idea to Picl, an animation production company in South Wales. They were completely on board with it and thought it was technically possible. So, we started the process of figuring out what kinds of characters would work; they needed to have the authority to tell the news in a fun way, but they also needed to be cost effective to make. We explored lots of ways of mixing cartoon animation with real news footage, creating a blended world with engaging characters. This whole back and forth process and decision making took so long because there were so many options. It was all new to us as we'd never worked with animators before.
We reached the end of our research with a sense of excitement and eagerness to continue.
We are currently looking for more funding to take our R&D to the next stage. If we get it, we’ll put it towards finding a technical solution to producing a programme with such a high production value in a short space of time. We’ll also continue our academic research, but in greater detail, and we’ll keep checking in with a panel of educators, parents and psychologists to ensure we’re doing the right things.