Don't do it, BBC! Why canning Newsround would be a catastrophe

When you grow up, you still think children’s TV is the way you left it. To many of us, Newsround is still presented every weekday by John Craven, or by Lizo Mzimba, just before Neighbours. Except, of course, that it isn’t. The children’s news show was shifted to the CBBC channel early in 2013, and soon it may barely be on that channel either.

With the rise of on-demand television and the changing ways children consume news, CBBC is asking Ofcom if it can cut Newsround bulletins on their channel from 85 to 35 hours per year. At the same time it will “evolve” and expand its offering for children on its website. The iconic teatime bulletin, a broadcast that has run every weekday since John Craven’s Newsround in 1972, will be cut. All that will appear on the channel is a short morning bulletin, which is still popular and shown in schools.

At first glance, the BBC’s plan makes sense. Children today have never known anything but an age of streaming and internet news on tap. Newsround viewers have dropped in recent years, while the website claims to reach more than 900,000 readers.

Yet I still fear greatly for the children’s show. For one thing, how can clicks on a news website replicate the scale of a traditional bulletin? Newsround’s knack has always been the breadth of stories it squeezes into five to 10 minutes: topics ranging from alcoholism, growing up in care, the environment, the consequences of social media on self-esteem, in just a few minutes. It expands your world while at the same time challenging it, introducing themes you may never have given a second thought to beforehand. If you are going to focus mostly on a website, accessed by clicking on a story you might already be interested in, are you going to still be informed and challenged in the same way? I dread to think of a world where Newsround gets sucked into the world of chasing clicks.

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Then there’s the fact that Newsround is also watched by adults and children together at times when serious news breaks, such as the Ariana Grande Manchester concert attacks, to help inform and reassure children and let them know that they are safe. Will the internet suffice? A short bulletin in the morning rather than a traditional evening one feels like a step backward.

But my main fear for Newsround is not what is happening now, but what could happen in years to come. If you reduce the number of hours the show has on the channel, you also risk the show dropping out of public consciousness altogether, making it more vulnerable to being chopped entirely should cuts come later on.

The bulletin has also been a training ground for many television journalists, from Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy to ITV’s Julie Etchingham, Beyond Today’s Matthew Price and Brexitcast’s Adam Fleming. And these broadcasts get kids interested in journalism too. It certainly did for me. The pain I felt when I wasn’t chosen to be a Press Pack reporter still hurts me to this day.

Newsround obviously has to reflect modern times, but it should also still have the same prominence that has made it such a well–known and well–loved destination for generations. Moving too far into the relentless world of the internet risks it feeling like old news.