Time Publishes 8-Page Spinoff For Schoolkids
For more than a half-century, elementary schoolchildren have learned about current events from two look-alike competitors: Weekly Reader and Scholastic News.
Week after week during the school year, the pair have come into the classroom offering a mix of features based on more-or-less current events and back pages devoted to questions and learning activities.
But this school year, there is a shake-them-up competitor, Time For Kids, a glossy spinoff of Time magazine intended for children in grades four through six.
In just eight pages, it manages to look like the adult Time, with graphics adapted from Time and stories based on Time reports.
Claudia Wallis, managing editor of the Time entry, said the new section came about as an outgrowth of Time’s magazine-in-the-classroom program for high school students.
“We’ll be timely,” said Wallis.
Being able to go to press on a Friday and in classrooms the following Wednesday, Wallis said, “is our greatest strength. We’ll try to give kids a sense of real news.”
Wallis kicked off the first issue with a dramatic cover photo of a crying child in Sarajevo and a story that carried the news right up through the early-September NATO bombing raids in Bosnia.
In the same week, it carried an on-deadline story of Cal Ripken’s record-shattering 2,131st game and coverage about Hurricane Luis.
But there are stories Time will stay clear of, Wallis said. They include those about abortion (“a high risk of being offensive”) and religion (“lands like a bomb in schools”).
Against the Bosnia story in Time for Kids, Weekly Reader’s cover story offered fourth-graders an article about the conflict on trails between bikers and hikers, and fifth-graders a story on congressional efforts to limit television violence. Scholastic News, meanwhile, carried a sports story with a cover photo of Dodgers pitcher Hideo Nomo.
The competition is real, acknowledged Sandra Maccarone, Weekly Reader’s editor-in-chief.
“They have us beat” on timeliness, she said.
But Maccarone, a former elementary schoolteacher in New Jersey, criticized Time for Kids’ effort to put out one magazine for all three grades - fourth, fifth and sixth.
“I think there’s a big difference conceptually between fourth- and sixth-graders,” she said, with fourth-graders at the start of a new school year still thinking like third-graders.
Scholastic News editor Hugh Roome also stressed the importance of “grade-level specific” magazines.
“In general,” he said, “material for the average fourth-grader is not good for the sixth-grader - and the vice versa is absolutely not good.”
Wallis countered the grade-level criticisms by suggesting that “there is enough in each issue for all readers, and it’s how the teacher uses it.”
Time is claiming an initial circulation of 700,000 copies at what Wallis called “an introductory rate” of $2.95, against 8 million for Weekly Reader’s eight separate editions and 1.5 million for Scholastic’s fourth- and fifth-grade editions.