24 word on the street Decline by nine In 2019, a report by educational publisher Scholastic identified a concerning issue: by the time children reach the age of nine, they stop wanting to read for pleasure. Why? “At nine, most children can read, and they’ve experienced a joy in learning how to read,” says Anna Bassi, Editorial Director of The Week Junior. “But suddenly, they’re expected to read to learn, and it changes from something pleasurable to an obligation.” This could have a huge impact on several areas of a child’s life, she explains. “Obviously reading is fundamental to children’s future success, but it’s about more than where being able to read takes you in your career,” Anna says. “There are loads of other proven benefits, such as nurturing good mental health and resilience, being able to use your imagination, being able to empathise, reading to relax, as well as having a bigger vocabulary and being able to express yourself.” Did she experience the decline by nine? “I don’t think so – but there is a difference for children who grow up in ‘bookish’ households,” she says. “There was never a shortage of books in my house; my mum was a teacher, and my great auntie worked in a library.” Unsurprisingly, research has shown that children are very much influenced by their parents when it comes to reading, whether they are read to, or whether the adults in their lives are seen to be reading for pleasure. “If your child grows up in a household where reading is part of your routine, you’re more likely to enjoy your reading. If a kid grows up in a house that doesn’t have many books, or where the parents aren’t readers, don’t have time to read or can’t afford books, then the chance of you becoming a reader for pleasure is smaller.” Can magazines for children turn the tide? That’s certainly the hope, she says. “They are learning when they read The Week Junior, but because they enjoy reading it, they don’t realise,” she says. “Quite a lot of schools take TWJ, teachers really like it – and we’ve talked a lot about how we can get into more schools – but part of me doesn’t want it to become ‘something that you do at school’, and stop being ‘something that’s yours’. The personal relationship you have with a magazine is so important.” ‘The Week Junior’ The amount of research and thought that has gone into creating TWJ– from the mix of content, to format, to tone, to visuals – is astounding… and exemplary. Take the design, for example. “When we launched the magazine in 2015, Ash Gibson, creative director, had done a lot of work around design for accessibility: the best typefaces and colours, the best ways to present text in a way that people with dyslexia will find easier to read and follow,” she says. This was in direct contrast to a lot of children’s publications at the time, which were invariably based on a huge entertainment brand, such as Peppa Pig or Thomas the Tank Engine, and where content itself was not the priority. “A lot of kids’ magazines are just very colourful – the brand comes first, then a covermount second, then content a low third,” she says. “In most cases that’s fun and entertaining, but it tends to mean they aren’t always legible, or designed to actually be read.” Anna describes the layouts of TWJ as restrained and quite rigid, partly for reasons of efficiency (“we haven’t got time to reinvent pages every week!”) and partly for simple navigability. “In most kids’ magazines, you open up any given page, and it’s not always obvious where you start or finish,” Anna says. “We are providing our readers with stories, and we want them to read those stories – so they need to know the journey.” It’s also likely that readers who are less able to read or less enthusiastic about reading will be put off by the sight of a page that’s very densely packed with text, she explains. “We use lots of pictures and break the text up, and we also have shapes called ‘splobs’ with fun facts on them – almost like a little biscuit that we put on the page to draw in the reader.” This level of thought extends to the headlines. “We obviously want to provoke curiosity, but we don’t go in for gags or puns or alliteration just for the sake of it,” she says. “As a child of eight, say, you might not get that gag, and you’ve missed the point of what the story is about. So we try to be direct. It’s quite a plain approach to it all, stripping everything back to the basics, and literally designing a magazine that kids want to read.” The content mix The choice of content is absolutely critical; as a current affairs magazine it has to provide an honest reflection of the world, but, says Anna, “if we just enslaved ourselves to the headlines of the week, it would be a really depressing magazine.” It’s also a challenge to make sure the more serious or upsetting stories are presented suitably for children, As a kids’ current affairs magazine, ‘The Week Junior’ doesn’t shy away from the real stories – but presents them in a child-friendly way.
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