I was mentioning to my kids the other day that they should be reading world news, since really you should know what’s going on outside your corner of the world. We don’t subscribe to a newspaper so the news getting would be all online.And now that I think of it, my remembrances of childhood morning always seem to feature a “real” newspaper – a physical paper that you could hold in your hand and peruse. Like black and white and read all over. 

Those of course, were simpler times when the word venerable could actually be used to describe newspapers. Like the venerable “Times of India”. Unlike today where one hesitates in visiting the Times of India or Indian Express websites because they offer massively dumbed down news with sleazy headlines. The CNN news website also has gotten picture-rich and offers news bulleted style, probably because with our short attention spans we might go wandering off if we’re actually forced to get news in more than 140 characters. And HLN (which is a CNN spinoff) received a recent make-under which made reporting more sensationalistic and controversial – all the news you didn’t need to know.

Anyway, searching around for current events websites that actually catered to kids and were non-sensationalistic blah-blah-blah, have come across two, which seem decent and actually report news :

• PBS Newshour Extra
• Britannica News Net

There are others like the Scholastic, Time for Kids and National Geographic News for kids websites, respectable, kid-friendly organisations, although I didn’t find them as current-event-news-minded as I liked.