Five years ago
Golnar Khosrowshahi’s twin daughters came to her with questions about a
newspaper photo they stumbled across. “My kids had seen a photograph of a little
girl. She was disheveled and bruised and battered and beaten. She was an
earthquake survivor. They started asking questions: ‘What happened to her? Why
did this happen?’” Khosrowshahi recalls.
But this “Type
A” mom knew that turning on television news coverage or looking the story up on
Google News was not the best way to get her children’s questions answered.
“Mainstream news is not a safe place…with your child,” she says. “You don’t
know what you’re going to see, from an image standpoint. There are things on
CNN that are fine for you and me, but it’s not necessarily what you want your
eight- or nine-year-old to see.”
So Khosrowshahi
took the matter into her own hands. “I started leaving [my daughters] a
newsletter that they could have with their breakfast,” she says. “I started
adding the weather and things like that, just topical news. It was really all
inspired by that one photograph and the questions that came about because of
it. And then it just grew.”
Khosrowshahi
began sharing the newsletter with friends and family. “People liked the idea,”
she reflects. “[Eventually]…I moved it onto a couple of different web-based
products and now we are where we are today.”
Where it is
today is among the leading sites for children-focused news content. Thousands of readers flock to GoGoNews.com every day. And there are good
reasons why they keep coming back.
GoGoNews, aimed
at kids aged five to 13, is updated daily and features current news stories
that are geared toward young minds. The site is organized into categories of
interest, including Planet, which focuses on articles with an ecological angle;
Picks, which includes recommendations on new products, toys and books; and
Cool, a page of games, riddles and other bits of fun.
Unlike some
kids’ news sites, which resemble a hyper-caffeinated Times Square, Khosrowshahi notes that GoGoNews was
designed with simplicity in mind. “We wanted it to have some gravitas and still
be appealing to kids and be simple,” she says. “We don’t really have anything
happening ‘below the fold.’ That’s because kids don’t really know that they
need to scroll down to find more content. So, while it looks simplistic, a lot
of that was done deliberately.”
Another thing
that sets GoGoNews apart is daily updates—even during the summer, when other
sites take a break. Khosrowshahi researched her site’s summer traffic and was
surprised to find that the number of hits had increased significantly. “There
were so many kids commenting on the stories. The numbers don’t lie.”
GoGoNews also
doesn’t shy away from difficult stories. For instance, this year, the site
covered the 10-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Khosrowshahi
believes a well-written piece can serve as an effective launching pad for
families to discuss these types of world events. “We covered it from the angle
of ‘On this day, this happened ten years ago.’ Very, very factual,” she says.
“We don’t get into a lot of cause and effect in these articles, because we need
to leave room for our readers—and the families of the readers—to create their
own judgment when they’re communicating with their children.”
Khosrowshahi
doesn’t decide how to approach these stories all on her own, though.
“I work with a
psychiatrist in the city, Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, who is a consultant to
GoGoNews… We also work with an educational consultant to give us the ‘what’s
happening at school’ perspective.”
But that’s not
to imply that the site is all hard news, all the time. “We feature a lot of
science stories, new planets or new fossils and those kinds of things, and
stories about pets or animals. We’ll cover a lot of art-related stories, like
new exhibitions. The thread here is that they are all current stories,”
Khosrowshahi comments.
One recent
article featured New Zealand’s release of a set of Star Wars coins.
“It’s a great story, because kids love Star Wars, so it’s got mass appeal on
that front, but so many people emailed us asking, ‘Where can I get these
coins?’ I had no choice but to direct them to the New Zealand government’s site,” Khosrowshahi says.
“A kid reads that and walks away asking, ‘Where is New Zealand?’ It’s that additional piece of
information that that child has learned because of his or her love of Star
Wars.”
Looking ahead,
Khosrowshahi and her team are currently expanding the site to include
GoGoTeach, which will allow teachers to utilize worksheets in which stories from
the site can be used to practice reading comprehension, punctuation and other
literacy skills.
Perhaps the
reason Khosrowshahi has been so effective at creating a functional site for
kids and their families is that she’s a consumer of the site as well as its
creator. Her daughters have grown up with the news stories that she has helped
them follow. “They remember things from three years ago, which I find amazing,”
she says. “I see that retention and I see that they have some resource to draw
on when they’re forming their opinions. One of their resources is this exposure
that they’ve had.”
Thanks to
Khosrowshahi’s kid-focused take on current affairs, GoGoNews has become the
go-to site for parents who wish to expose their kids to events and reports from
all over the world. And it all started with a single photograph and a conversation.
For more
information, visit gogonews.com.
