This is newspaper weekend at the Watson home. That is, once a month, we put together Watson’s World News, an 8 page newspaper filled with stories downloaded from the internet and easied up for the students, word games, and a few ads for our school. We used to do a print version, now it’s just online (www.watsonenglish.cz).
Anyway, for page 7 I like to do a theme thing, so we can have a banner headline over 3 related stories. This month, after I found the story about the 14 year old kid who created the number 1 iphone app, and one about a 13 year old who defended himself against a pack of wolves by playing heavy metal music on his phone, I thought “impressive things very young kids have done” would make a good theme.
It very often happens that once I’ve picked a theme based on two stories, it’s really difficult to find the 3rd one. In this case it was a nightmare. I googled “kids do cool things” and got a whole bunch of irrelevant articles. Then I decided to just simplify the process. I googled 13 year old and got “13 year old sentenced for murder” “13 year old robs bank” and so forth. I googled 12 year old and got “Girl, 12, Pregnant” and “12 year old stabs sister” and so on.
So, I finally found the story about the 10 year old amateur astronomer who discovered a supernova, and went with the theme under the headline “The Future is in Good Hands, With Kids Like These,” but my faith was shaken. There are more rotten kids than brilliant kids. I guess that’s understandable. It’s easier to be spectacularly rotten than spectacularly brilliant, and the same is true for adults. It also gets more press coverage.
The saving grace in all this, fortunately for the human race, is that the vast majority of kids are neither brilliant nor rotten. They’re just kids. They don’t rob banks or kill people, and they don’t discover supernovas, but they don’t have to. They will grow up to be bus drivers, plumbers, receptionists and hairdressers as well as doctors and lawyers. And that’s O.K.
Kathryn Gray, Interstellar Explorer, 10 Years Old
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I would argue that of the kids who do newsworthy things, the rotten things outweigh the cool things in the press because, well “if it bleeds, it leads”.
It’s a sad and sorry state of affairs, and worse since Murdoch took over the Hearst mantle (and daily makes Hearst roll in his grave, I’m guessing).
Hearst (You give me the pictures, I’ll give you the war) was no angel, either.