A "Metro" for Children

Almost half of the 4 million people in Bolivia are children. "Obviously, this is an excellent market for the creation of a newspaper exclusively for children," says Mr Echeverry.

"Mi Super Diario" is a newspaper sold exclusively in grammar schools in Bolivia,. The paper, designed for children 7- to 12-years old, has seen circulation triple since it was introduced in 2003. The concept -- which Mr Echeverry describes as "a Metro for children", will soon expand into other Latin American nations.

Mr Echeverry’s presentation examined the strategies for circulation, content, format, advertising, research, personnel and other areas for such a publication.

Some key points:

 The newspaper is distributed Monday through Friday by subscription direct to private and public schools, This guarantees penetration and keeps cost of the newspaper low.

 The newspaper has three sections -- daily news that children want to know in the front, current events and news that is applicable to schools in the center, and entertainment news in the back.

 Marketing is primarily by direct mail, with promotion devices that appeal to children -- postcards, rulers, calendars.

Lessons for Newspapers from Magazines

"Know your audience" is the message from Mr Edwards, who publishes 53 separate local magazines with a combined distribution of 2.1 copies per issue.

His audience is 4- to 11-year olds and their parents, and he provides them with information on "things to do at a place near you."

"Although journalists, editors, publishers and chief executives are becoming increasingly more aware of target markets, there is still a considerable amount of published information which is reaching young people and has very little relevance to their lifestyles," he says.

Watch out for stereotypes and conventional wisdom, he cautions. Words like "typical family." For example, more and more children are the products of divorce -- one-third of marriages fail in Britain -- so it is better to say, "ask an adult to help you" rather than "ask Mum and Dad."

The ethnic character of an audience is also important. The population of East Midlands in England, for example, is over 40 percent Asian. "Last November, whilst the local newspapers were targeting the population with Christmas offers, parties and events, we produced an "end of Autumn term edition," he says.

"It is easy to collect readership data. Make sure that it is available to everyone involved in the production of your publication."

Increase Circulation While Educating the Young

There are three keys to a successful Newspapers in Education programme: interaction between children and newspapers; educational validity; and exposure to reading the newspaper as a whole, says Ms Cahill.

How the West Australian goes about achieving these aims was the subject of her presentation.

Ms Cahill described a variety of NIE initiatives used by the West Australian, including serialised stories, with chapters published week-by-week; a creative writing project that uses newspapers as the source of ideas; and weekly online worksheets for using the newspaper’s travel pages in "passport to the world" exercises.

The importance of this work cannot be underestimated, says Ms Cahill, who quoted a Newspaper Association of America study of the impact of student involvement with newspapers on adult readership.

"This research found that young adults who remember using the newspaper in school are more likely to develop lifelong readership habits than those who say they had no exposure to newspapers in school, according to this study of 1,500 18-to-34-year olds."

Young Journalists Mean Young Readers

The Austrian daily Der Standard has the youngest readership of all Austrian newspapers.

"Our market researcher likes to say: ’Our readers don’t get old’," says Ms Reicher. "Fifty-two percent of all Standard readers are younger than 40, which is also the average age of our readers. The average age of the readers from other quality and mass papers is between 45 and 48."

How do they do it? One way is by using teen-agers to report and write. Ms Reicher is an expert on this subject -- in 1995, she was the first student chosen to write The Standard’s new weekly student page. She was 15 at the time.

"Because youngsters become part of the paper like real journalists, Der Standard does not get young readers but also young writers who may stay on at other sections of the paper," says Ms Reicher. "We want to give the youngsters the feeling of being taken seriously in their interests and problems by giving them the opportunity to write about those things on their own."

Making a Difference with Straight Talk

In the early 1990s, when the HIV epidemic was at its peak in Uganda, nearly one-third of pregnant teen-agers were infected.

Today only about 5 percent of pregnant girls have HIV -- a dramatic decline that has not been seen anywhere else in the world. And "Straight Talk" newspaper, designed for students 15-19, provided information that helped reduce the terrible toll.

The idea behind Straight Talk is simple -- the newspaper encourages and relies on letters from teen-agers to produce the bulk of its material on issues that concern them. Although it is written by newspaper professionals, and distributed with the biggest Ugandan daily, The New Vision, the bulk of its news and information comes from hundreds of letters it receives each week from teen-agers.

"The beauty of the letters is that they give hundreds of kids a chance to get their words and names in the newspaper and to truly drive the content," says Ms Watson. "We say that our newspapers are adolescent-driven, rather than adolescent-run. They are interactive and democratically assembled and conceived but professionally edited by journalists."

Ms Watson’s experience is useful to any newspaper interested in attracting teen readers. She provided 10 recommendations for doing so. For example: " Do not be afraid of being an adult editing for adolescents; research shows that adolescents want more adult involvement, not less. It is not true that adolescents only care about their peers."

Newspapers AND Education

What is known as "Newspapers in Education" in most of the world is known as "Newspapers AND Education" in Brazil.

"We believe it is a partnership and we wanted the name to reflect this," says Ms Lozza, who provided two case studies -- at O Globo in Rio de Janeiro and at A Tribuna in Santos -- to illustrate how the programme works.

She also described the philosophy of Newspapers and Education, which focuses on citizenship building more than on commercial and business targets. Two main points: the newspapers must be used in their entirety in the classroom, and teachers must be trained to work with the newspapers.

"A successful experience stimulates pleasure in reading, helps young people to develop independent attitudes, disseminates how the press works and its social role, and assists in the overall development of the school curricula," she says.

A Daily Supplement for Teen-Agers

Seven years ago, low readership levels among teen-agers caused Spain’s El Mundo to launch a daily youth supplement, inserted into the paper to be read by 14- to 18-year olds both inside and outside of schools.

Today, the 8-page supplement, called Aula, has a readership of 300,000 and is used by 4,000 schools in 12,000 classrooms. Mr Gomez described the elements that have led to this success and which could be useful for others. Among them:

 The daily supplement takes a different theme each day: school subjects on Monday, sports on Tuesday, social welfare on Wednesday, science on Thursday and culture on Friday.

 The paper provides a wealth of free materials to teachers to help them use Aula in the classroom, including notebooks, copy books, instruction books and even a book on how a newspaper is put together.

 Students are encouraged to visit the newsroom -- 5,000 of them do so annually.

 Average age of an Aula journalist is 23-years old. After one or two years on the paper, they are integrated into the staff of the main paper and are replaced by recent university graduates.