At 5.20pm on Tuesday 4 April 1972, a man with shiny black hair said: “Hello,” and made television history. Small confession: no recording of that first edition of Newsround exists, so I don’t know for sure that he said hello, but thereafter he always began: “Hello again,” so it is more conjecture than a wild guess. The television history part is a fact. Fifty years on, with children asking questions about war and their need for a trustworthy, sensitive source of news, Newsround is more important than ever.
It played a big part in my own childhood. In those days – the 70s – you came back from school and put the telly on. John Craven – the man with the shiny hair, as well as a nice line in 70s shirts and, later, offensively brightly coloured jumpers – told us what was going on in the cold war and Northern Ireland, as well as a lot of brighter news stories, generally involving animals. (The debut episode included a report about ospreys returning to Scotland.) “He is clearly one of the most influential journalists of the last 50 years,” says Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Channel 4’s lead newsreader. “And strangely unsung. When you think of the names thrown around over the past half-century, Craven is up there with David Dimbleby.”
John Craven’s Newsround, as it was called then, featured in Guru-Murthy’s childhood, too. He used to come home from school in Blackburn and settle down to Newsround with a cup of tea and a crumpet. He didn’t know then that, a decade or so later, from 1991 to 1994, he would be on the other side of the screen, reporting and presenting for the show.
Newsround was one of the world’s first TV news magazines made specifically for children. It was commissioned as a short series by the BBC’s Children’s department, but using BBC News facilities. It began life with a handful of staff and a couple of typewriters. (I always thought the percussive original opening theme sounded like a report being bashed out on a typewriter.)
Craven – now 81, hair less black and shiny, but still very much around on Countryfile – was the main man for 17 years, until 1989. In those days before the internet and 24-hour rolling news, Newsround would sometimes be the first opportunity for the BBC to put out a big story. The news of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981 and the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 were broken on the programme.
Post-Craven, Newsround became a stepping stone to more grown-up careers. Helen Rollason (Grandstand’s first female presenter) and Julie Etchingham (now an anchor on ITV News at Ten) did stints. Guru-Murthy covered the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia while still at university. “It was an incredible time to be learning about journalism,” he says. “There were so many geopolitical events. We didn’t shy away from any story; we assumed that children were interested in everything. They were very formative experiences, trying to explain complex events to a young audience in a way that would really bring it home to them.”
It was brilliant training, he says. “I constantly find myself going: do I need to explain this, do a bit of background; should we have a map?” He is talking to me from his home, but he is heading to Ukraine any minute now. Behind him, on a big screen, CNN is showing scenes of the war.
It has also helped him stockpile a commodity that is invaluable in the delivery of news: trust. When Channel 4 News did some audience research a few years ago, “the viewers were saying: ‘We trust Krishnan because we have grown up with him, watching him on Newsround.’”
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Lizo Mzimba, who presented from 1998 to 2008 and is now the BBC’s entertainment correspondent, has joined our video call. He has a healthy trust fund, too. “It’s really useful having people who have watched you [when they were kids]. Occasionally, you bump into somebody on the red carpet and they say: “God, I used to love watching you on Newsround.’ It helps break the ice a bit. They’re less on their guard – it’s that guy I used to watch on Newsround, I know him, I trust him. You get a better relationship with them and better answers.”
Guru-Murthy and Mzimba say Newsround taught them to use short sentences and simple words wherever possible. Mzimba covered floods in Mozambique, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 for the show, but he also has fond memories of some of the less serious things, such as a piece about triathlons that had him signing off in a swimming pool, wearing a big pair of orange armbands: “Lizo Mzimba, Newsround, doing the doggy paddle.”
It wasn’t all collapsing regimes for Guru-Murthy, either. During his time, they did a mock general election for kids. He also went on the road with Take That, for a piece about fan mania. The sillier stuff hadn’t been part of the career plan. “I wanted to head towards my broadcasting heroes. I never imagined I would be sitting in the cupboard with Edd the Duck, but it was great fun.”
Newsround also set the agenda. “It was pushing environmental news long before adult news was,” says Guru-Murthy. “Kids were interested in the world, in animals, the environment, in saving the planet. We were making programmes about that agenda because that’s where kids were already. It’s not about adults deciding what children should be interested in; this was the BBC meeting a need that was out there already.”
It led the way on diversity, too. “The makers of Newsround were much more aware of the need to reflect the audience, for kids to see people who look like them, and that also meant bringing in younger presenters,” says Guru-Murthy, mentioning Lucy Mathen (who now runs the Indian blindness charity Second Sight) and Terry Baddoo (now a writer-producer at USA Today), who preceded him.
Mzimba says: “As a young black boy living in the UK, I was particularly aware of people like Trevor McDonald and Moira Stuart. Then later figures on Newsround, like Terry Baddoo and Krishnan, of course. In a way, it was more subconscious than conscious, but they were all really key figures in making me think that perhaps this was the kind of job I could do in the future, so I will be eternally grateful to them for they path they trod.”
In production and sets, too, Newsround was ahead of the curve, says Guru-Murthy – even back in the Craven days. “He understood that the way to make a presenter more friendly was to bring them out in front of the desk,” he says. “People standing up, moving around the studio, things like that.” Now, all the newsreaders do it.
The way people – children included – get their news has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. In 2002, Newsround moved to the new channel CBBC, expanding from a single programme on weekday afternoons to bulletins throughout the day, seven days a week. “We were lucky when we did Newsround and the main activity after school was watching television, so CBBC had a huge grip on children’s time and attention,” says Mzimba. “With the internet and social media, it’s a challenge to get younger people more engaged, because they don’t come to traditional news programmes in the way they used to.”
“It is frustrating that kids don’t have the same tradition of watching TV news,” says Guru-Murthy. “But that’s just a challenge of the world today. We’ve got to take it on, wise up to it, and we are doing.”
On the day I am speaking to the two former presenters, one of the current presenters, De’Graft Mensah, leads the morning bulletin with a piece about World Book Day. This may not be news in the traditional sense, but is justifiable, says Guru-Murthy. “As a parent, I know it’s hugely significant – it’s what kids are talking about that day – so in terms of their world it’s the big story.” Then there is a report from Ukraine about refugees, especially children, on the border with Poland. This leads nicely into a feature by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s specialist disinformation reporter, about misleading news and how to spot it.
Doing a story such as Ukraine for children is not that different from doing any kind of story, says Guru-Murthy. “You try to explain as much of the history – the Soviet Union and Putin – as you can, briefly and concisely. And you have to show quite a lot of the imagery, certainly the bangs and the disruption, but you would be very careful about the amount of distressing footage of people, especially of children.”
There is a duty of care to the viewer, he says. While his target audience was eight to 12, there might have been younger children watching; their parents had the right to put them in front of it and for them not to be distressed by the content. “That didn’t mean you couldn’t tackle very serious news or would have to sanitise; we would just explain and contextualise, not scare anyone. It’s the opposite of a lot of news now, especially on the internet, which is driven towards hyping and trying to get clicks.”
In July 2020, the 4pm programme was axed, with the focus moving to the 7.45am edition, BBC iPlayer and a website of explainers and features, including Happy News (maintaining a Newsround tradition of covering good news as well as bad). The BBC estimates that 2 million children watch the show at least once a week in schools, while the website attracts 750,000 unique browsers a week. Since the invasion of Ukraine, viewership of the online bulletin has increased by 25%.
So: another 50 years, then? Of course, they both say yes, that you only have to look at the world to see the need for Newsround. That “might not be on television, but it will be in the media they are consuming in 50 years’ time,” says Guru-Murthy. Although he is no longer with the BBC, he gets in a dig at those who bash it. “Just look at what the BBC is doing in Ukraine and Russia. I look forward to seeing what Netflix, Amazon and Apple are doing in comparison. When you’ve got a real war, cultural war is put into sharp perspective.”
Five questions from schoolchildren
My own kids have grown up with Newsround, just in school rather than after it. Their mum is a primary school teacher, one of the 75% of them who use Newsround as a teaching tool. She asked the six- and seven-year-olds in her year 2 class if they had any questions for the former presenters. They did.
Why does Newsround exist?
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: To explain what is going on in the world in a way that is clear, with facts you can trust.
Lizo Mzimba: Because there is a demand for it. Children are interested in news; they deserve to get it in a way that is specifically tailored to their interests and the way they absorb information.
Where do you find the news?
KGM: Most of the time, it comes from us finding things out from our journalists around the world, asking people what is going on and then telling you about it.
Is it all true?
LM: Newsround works really hard to make sure what it says is accurate and in the correct context.
KGM: We tried very hard to get it right – harder than most adult news programmes.
Is it dangerous?
KGM: Sadly, a lot of children live in dangerous places. To tell you about their lives and to explain what’s going on, you sometimes have to go to dangerous places, but you try very hard not to put yourselves at risk in the process.
What did you learn from doing it?
LM: When you’re gathering information in order to put out a programme like Newsround, you have to understand things yourself before you can explain it to somebody else. So it’s a wonderful way to learn about the world we live in – all the issues that affect people of all ages.
