One edition every morning, Monday to Saturday. Seven to ten stories, each rewritten for a child from the day's real reporting, each read aloud, and every edition signed by an editor before it goes anywhere.
Then a subscription for the whole family. Cancel any time.
A morning
One edition. When you reach the end, it ends.
No feed, no recommendations, no reason to come back twelve times. Everybody reads the same paper in the same order, and it is finished before breakfast is.
This week’s papers and recordings are here to return to, along with older papers our editors choose to keep. Other older papers are put away. Papers already downloaded stay on the iPad for the usual thirty-day offline window.
An example edition · explore a story and its glossary
In July, a river in the west of England stopped moving. The water did not vanish all at once. It sank away into the gravel of the riverbed until what was left was a chain of still pools with no current running between them.
Rivers do this in a very dry summer, and the reason is mostly underground. Most of the water in an English river never falls straight into it. It soaks into the ground first, into a layer of rock called an , and seeps back out slowly over the following months. When too little rain falls in winter, the aquifer does not fill up — and by August there is nothing left to seep.
This autumn the rain came back. Water is moving along the whole length of the river again, and the fish that spent the summer crowded into the deepest pools have spread out along it.
Still unknown
Whether the insects that live in the riverbed survived. They are counted once a year, in spring, so nobody will know until then.
That is the paper. Every story can be read, or listened to, or both.
An example edition, to show the shape of a morning.
Why it exists
The news assumes you already know things. A child doesn't.
Where a country is. What a central bank does. Who that politician is, and what the treaty was for. Adult news is built on a floor of assumed knowledge, and a child meets that floor in the first paragraph and stops. That gap, not the subject matter, is what keeps children out of the news.
So Daybreak explains as it goes. A word a reader might not have met is marked, and tapping it opens a panel with what it means, how to say it, and the sentence they just saw it in — without losing their place. The reading is the lesson. A child who finishes a Daybreak story knows something the story assumed they didn't.
How a story is made
A machine drafts. A person decides. The person's name is on it.
From reported news. Every story begins with real reporting by named news organisations, and says where it came from.
Rewritten, not summarised. Written for a nine-to-eleven reader in plain language — no graphic detail, and no description of injury to individuals.
What is still unknown. Where a story is unfinished, it says so, rather than tidying the world into an ending.
Signed before it publishes. An editor reads the whole edition and signs it. An unsigned edition does not go out — that is enforced by the software, not by good intentions.
Read aloud
A voice that reads the paper, not one that performs it.
Every story can be listened to, and the reading is not a robot working through a page. It opens the morning, names each story as it arrives, and closes when the paper is done.
Around a difficult story it changes. The reading slows and quietens, and the short spoken line that joins one story to the next drops its brightness on both sides — going in and coming out. A child never hears a cheerful handover into a story about people dying, nor a cheerful recovery straight out of one.
Hard stories
The world is not age-rated. We don't pretend otherwise.
A paper that reported only on pandas and space telescopes would teach a child that the world is smaller and kinder than it is. So Daybreak may carry hard stories — but it follows the news rather than going looking for the hard parts of it. Difficult stories are never promoted, never led with for effect, and never included to fill a day.
Three kinds are kept out as a matter of policy:
Self-harm and suicide.
Violence against named individuals, unless the event is of major national or international significance.
Violence against children, other than where an event of real importance cannot honestly be reported without it.
When one does run, the reader meets a card before the story that names what is in it and invites them to read it with a grown-up and to stop whenever they want. The card comes first in the text and first in the audio. Nothing begins until they choose to go on.
This article discusses the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in America, in which many people died. It is a real and sad event in modern history. You can read it with an adult and stop whenever you wish.
An example of a card shown before a hard story
And a parent can switch hard stories off entirely. It is set per child, so a younger sibling on the same iPad can have it off while an older one has it on, and it follows them across every device on the family account. What it does not do is change the paper: every reader is served the same edition, in the same order. The setting decides whether a profile opens a card, and nothing else.
Where we stand
Not here to change anyone's mind.
Daybreak reports what happened and what follows from it, and stops there. The world is warming and the summers are hotter — both are reported. Whether that is bad, and what anyone should do about it, is left to the reader and their family. A story about a budget explains what a budget is, what changed and who it affects; it does not say whether the change was right. A story about an election explains how the vote works and what the result was; it has no favourite.
Subjects that exist mainly as arguments are left out rather than balanced. "Some people say", on either side of a question a nine-year-old has no way to weigh, teaches doubt rather than understanding.
What isn't in it
Nothing in the app reaches outward.
No advertising. None, of any kind, and none planned.
No open web. No in-app browser and no links out. Everything a reader can reach is inside the paper.
No messages. No comments, public profiles, friend lists or sharing. There is no route by which a child can be contacted through Daybreak.
No streaks or scores. Nothing counts what they missed. The paper offers itself; it never sets them a task.
No trackers. No analytics and no third-party SDKs.
Works offline. Once the morning's edition is on the iPad, it reads on a train, a plane, or a Tuesday with no signal.
Reading it
Three days free, then it's a subscription.
One subscription covers every child in the house, each with their own profile and their own settings. A grown-up sets it up; a child can't start, change or cancel one, and there is nothing else in the app to buy.