A collaboration between RNZ and TVNZ, News 2 Me, is set to deliver the news to tamariki in a language and way they can understand.
RNZ reporter Gill Bonnett. Photo: RNZ
RNZ reporter Gill Bonnett, who is producing the weekly series, tells Jesse Mulligan the idea was to have a platform that gave a child-friendly breakdown of current affairs.
Photo: TVNZ/RNZ
“If you think about everything that you’ve grown up knowing about and you look at a subject like Ukraine for example, even as an adult, that takes some explaining, because you don’t know everything about every topic, but as child you wouldn’t necessarily know what the United Nations was, or even really why wars happen.
“So part of our project isn’t just to give people the bulletin news of what’s just happened that week, but in the same way we’ve been doing explainers for adults for a while, actually just taking one subject each week and breaking that down into much more detail and that explainer part will be sometimes news topics and sometimes things that are of interest to that age group.”
The target audience is 10 to 12 year olds, but it might also appeal to younger tamariki too, Bonnet says.
There will be an episode out each week, starting from today; 4pm on TV2 on Fridays, it’ll also be available On Demand, and you can listen to it on RNZ just before the 7am news on Saturdays. You can also tune in via the podcast on Fridays.
“We’ve got so many different formats and I think that’s also the beauty of it, because obviously some people want to be able to watch it and have visuals and particularly with the explainer, there’s some great animation that TVNZ have come up with.”
Some of the topics covered in the episodes, which are just five minutes long, include Covid-19 cases among school children, the T rex on display at Auckland museum, how the All Whites are faring in the Oceania World Cup, Ukraine and an explainer on children’s screen time.
