ARCHIVE OCTOBER 2003

• NEWS:
  International Children's Day of Broadcasting theme 2003
  
  The theme for this year's ICDB (December 14th, 2003) is heroes and role models. Under the banner 'We can be heroes,' UNICEF is urging broadcasters to throw the spotlight onthose inspirational people - young and old - who help to make a world fitfor children.
  More info on the ICDB homepage
  
  
• COMPETITIONS:
  WHO Media Award 2004 - "Future for our Children"
  
  WHO/Europe is inviting entries for the WHO Media Award 2004, the "Future for our Children" and they would like to spread the word to reach as many film-makers as possible.
  The Fourth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health will bring together the 52 countries of the WHO European Region in Budapest in June 2004. The focus will be on how to reduce children's exposure to environmental hazards. To mark the occasion,the WHO Media Award 2004 will be presented.
  This is an award for films, programmes and public service announcements which touch on the subject of children and environmental hazards. They might be on for example, topics such as children and asthma, traffic, allergies, floods, chemicals, radiation,injuries, poverty, the afermath of war, unsafe water or bad housing. There are three categories (short films and public service announcements, documentaries, programmes made for or by young people (fiction or documentary)). The closing date is March 2004.
  For more info, click here or email Viv Taylor Gee at the WHO
  
  
• PRESS RELEASE:
  New Study Finds Children Age Zero to Six Spend As Much Time With TV, Computers and Video Games As Playing Outside
  
  Washington, D.C. – Even the very youngest children in America are growing up immersed in media, spendinghours a day watching TV and videos, using computers and playing video games, according to a new study released on October 28th, 2003 by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Children six and under spend an average of two hours a day using screen media (1:58), about the same amount of time they spend playing outside (2:01), and well over the amount they spend reading or being read to (39 minutes).
  FULL TEXT OF THE PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
  FULL REPORT (PDF - 1MB)
  
  
• NEWS:
  Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Awards 2003
  
  The CBA Unicef Award for Outstanding Local Children's Broadcasting has beenawarded to BBC World Service Trust/Doordarshan and Naco, the Indian AIDS organisation, for a vigorous and pioneering TV campaign on AIDS aimed at young people, which challenged minds and changed behaviour. The eight-member team led by series producer Sonia Chowdhry was honoured.
  More info on the CBA Awards 2003 website

  
  
• PRESS RELEASE:
  Kids account for one out of five Internet surfers in the US - More than 27 million American kids connect online
  
  Nielsen//NetRatings, the global standard for Internet audiencemeasurement and analysis, reports that more than 27 million Internet users between the ages of 2 and 17logged online from home in September 2003. Twelve million children aged 2-11 in the U.S. accessed theInternet from home while 14.9 million teens aged 12-17 connected online. In September, kids betweenthe ages of 2-17 represented 21 percent of active at home Internet users or one out of five Web surfers.
  FULL TEXT OF THE PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
  
  
• NEWS:
  Sesame Street Stories for children in the Middle East
  
  Episodes of the popular Sesame Street TV series for children are being produced in Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories with the support of the European Commission within its EU Partnership for Peace Programme. Building on the well-established Sesame Street model, these Sesame Stories aim to promote long-term respect and understanding in the Middle East among Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian children, in the belief that ignorance of others fuels the ongoing conflict in the region.
  FULL ARTICLE
  
  
• NEWS:
  Children fuel internet explosion
  
  Children are leading the way when it comes to venturing into cyberspace, surfing the net for music and games. The number of children online in Europe has jumped by a third in a year, analysts Nielsen/NetRatings have found.
  FULL ARTICLE
  
  
• NEWS:
  MP champions fast food ad ban
  
  A Labour MP is to introduce a bill that would ban fast food companies from advertising to pre-school children amid mounting pressure for the government to act to stem the rising tide of obesity among children in the UK.
  Debra Shipley, the MP for Stourbridge, wants parliament to vote for a ban on the "advertising of high fat, high sugar and high salt content food and drink during pre-school children's television".
  FULL ARTICLE

  
  
• NEWS:
  Unicef art contest winners awarded in Oman
  
  Images of peace, friendship and a beautiful environment were among the winning entries of the children's art competition entitled 'The World We Want', organised by Unicef under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Development in collaboration with the Omani Society for Fine Arts and private sector sponsors.
  FULL ARTICLE
  
  
• NEWS:
  Out of the circle - Campaign on Exclusion of Children Begins
  
  The Macedonian network of NGOs working on child rights promotion and Step by Step launched the campaign focused on exclusion of children under the motto "Out of the circle". UNICEF supports the campaign together with the Foundation Open Society Institute - Macedonia and the King Baudouin foundation. Over 200 children from rural and marginalized areas were involved in development of messages, drawings and stories about their life and how it feels to be excluded. Their messages will be used for the one-year campaign and will be displayed on billboards, city lights, posters and TV spot. The National Coordinator of the
  Macedonian network Antoni Novotnii presented an open letter to the Minister of Labour and Social Policy Jovan Manasievski calling for finalization of the National Plan of Action for Children. The Head of UNICEF Office Debora Comini called for new partnerships and cooperation with the media, civil society, governmental and non-governmental institutions - to promote society where diversity is respected, where the rights of every child are upheld, where no child is excluded. Across the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics the NGO Networks for Children with UNICEF support run similar region-wide public awareness campaign with a generic name Leave No Child Out.
  For more info, please see the UNICEF Macedonia website and Watch the OneMinute on Social Inclusion from Macedonia (1.92 MB, RealPlayer format)
  
  
• NEWS:
  www.theoneminutesjr.org featuring the Berlin workshop videos
  
  The OneMinutesJr website has been updated and now shows the 21 films produced by young filmmakers at the Berlin workshop (October 10-14).
  Go to www.theoneminutesjr.org for more
  
  
• NEWS:
  Disney Mag Caught 'Tween' A Kids Market And A Hard Place
  
  Disney Adventures publisher Kathy Gordon doesn't mince words when talking about challenges facing the handful of "tween" magazines battling for market supremacy. "It's an incredibly tough place to be," she says plainly. "There's only about five ad categories we can get. Beyond that, it really drops off."
  Indeed, certain categories - pharma, luxury goods - obviously have no place in a publication targeting children between the ages of six and 12. Other advertisers, like video game companies, tend to spend most of their dollars in Maxim and FHM before parceling out the scraps to younger-leaning titles. This leaves the tween mags - and there aren't many of them, perhaps owing to this precarious market position - to fight over a narrow range of confections, toys and packaged goods companies.
  FULL ARTICLE from MediaPost

  
  
• ARTICLES:
  Soap ratings war 'exposes children to TV violence'
  
  Children are being exposed to scenes of increasingly explicit sex andviolence in television soap operas amid an intense ratings war, according toa study published on October 6th.
  Of almost 1,000 parents interviewed about their attitudes to the 9pmwatershed, 47 per cent said they were concerned that soap operas containedmaterial that was not suitable for children. They expressed particularconcern about the "moral" effect on their children of a ratings war between Coronation Street on ITV and EastEnders on BBC.
  Around one third were also worried about content in crime series such as The Bill on ITV and police and hospital dramas, according to the joint study by the BBC, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the Independent Television Commission. A total of 4,000 adults and 1,500 children were questioned about pre-watershed viewing, either in focus groups or surveys. The research forms part of a series of studies by broadcast watchdogs into children's reaction to television. Last month a study into television violence accused Hollyoaks and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which are aimed at teenagers, of "overstepping the mark".
  The report found that 95 per cent of adults and 72 per cent of children support the watershed, which is policed by the ITC and the Broadcasting Standards Commission, both of which will be replaced by Ofcom in December. Under watershed rules programmes deemed unsuitable for children
  watching alone cannot be shown before 9pm. After that scenes equivalent to a 15-certificate film are permissible, and 18-certificate content can only be shown after 10pm.
  Publication of the report, The watershed: Providing a safe viewing zone, coincides with a series of soap storylines testing viewers' tastes. Parents were concerned at a plot in Coronation Street in which a serial killer drives into a canal in his car containing his estranged wife and her children. A significant minority of parents, particularly those with younger children, believed the underwater shots showing the family struggling to escape should not have been shown until later in the evening.
  FULL ARTICLE from The Independent
  
  
• NEWS:
  Campaign for Listening to Young People in the UK
  
  The Big Listen is a week dedicated to listening. It will feature activities designed to encourage more adults and organisations to listen to young people. It will also help to raise a lot more money for ChildLine, the UK's free, 24-hour helpline for children and young people.
  The Big Listen is part of the BT 'Am I Listening?' campaign which was launched in October 2002. It kicked off with the unveiling of a new partnership between BT and ChildLine, and the launch of BT's biggest ever social campaign.
  Although the initial focus is on helping ChildLine, this is only the beginning of a long term campaign which aims to ensure that every young voice is heard. The motivation comes from some original research that was conducted by BT in consultation with ChildLine in 2002. It revealed that the majority of children and young people in the UK believe that 'their voices are not being heard and acted upon'.
  During the Big Listen, BT will be working in partnership with ChildLine to publish guides to listening, both for adults and children and young people. In addition, the British Youth Council will pubish a new lobbying guide for young people. These new publications will feed in to an online debate.
  For more information, contact:
  The Big Listen
  Claire McDonald, Project Manager
  Tel: 00 44 20 7428 4946;
  Email: listening@biglisten.co.uk
  Website: www.biglisten.co.uk
  
  

• NEWS:
  MPs Want New Child Rights in UK Law
  
  An influential group of MPs and peers will call on the government to incorporate the UN convention on the rights of the child into British law, the Guardian has learnt.
  Such a move would allow children to challenge in the courts any legislation or policy as being against their best interests.
  FULL STORY from The Guardian
  
  
• NEWS:
  Internews and UNICEF Pave the Way For Future Youth Media Centers
  
  51 young people from various schools, orphanages and boarding schools, half of which belong to Youth Volunteer Groups that have been formed in the UNICEF supported Youth Resource Centers in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, took part in a series of journalism seminars in Baku and Ganja jointly organized by Internews-Azerbaijan Public Association and UNICEF.
  FULL ARTICLE from the Internews Azerbaijan website
  
  
• WEBSITES:
  www.theoneminutesjr.org voted "World Site of the Month"
  
  The OneMinutesJr website was voted "World Site of the Month - October 2003" by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The link on their website is in Dutch only, but you can find more info on www.theoneminutesjr.org itself or in the MAGIC Bank.
  Two of the OneMinutesJr from the Tbilisi workshop will be shown on BBC 2 on October 18th and 20th as part of the BBC Blast TV program. For more info, please go to the BLAST TV schedule.
  
  
• RESEARCH:
  Children in Newspapers - A Global Content Study
  
  The "Children in Newspapers" global project asked students aged 10-12 to read their local newspaper for one week, cutting out, discussing and categorising articles that portrayed children.
  This work builds on earlier studies from the United Kingdom (1998) and the United States (1996), where newspapers were not partners in the effort, as well upon a Nordic NIE Survey of 2002 and four previous studies of young people in the press carried out in Norway/Sweden between 1994-2000.
  MORE INFO on the WAN website
  
  
  
  For older news items, please go to the ARCHIVE

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