Age suitability

What it is

A newspaper for nine to eleven year olds, read on iPad. Six issues a week, Monday to Saturday, seven to ten stories each. Every story is written for that age from news reported elsewhere that day. There is no Sunday paper.

Why it exists

News written for adults assumes a reader who already knows things: where a country is, what a central bank does, who a named politician is, what a treaty was for. A child meets a wall of those assumptions 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. Events, people, countries and ideas are explained at the point a reader meets them — a word opens a panel with its meaning and where it was used; a concept the story leans on gets its own answer a child can read on its own. The reading is the lesson. A child who finishes a Daybreak story knows something about the world that the story assumed they did not.

What we publish, and what we leave out

The news is not age-rated, so Daybreak may carry hard stories. A paper that reported only on pandas and space telescopes would teach a child that the world is smaller and kinder than it is.

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.

Everything below is how the stories that do run are handled.

Where Daybreak stands

Daybreak is not trying to change anyone's mind. It is trying to explain the world to someone who is nine.

So it 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 — the ones adults are invited to take a side on, where the argument is the point — are left out rather than balanced. Balance in a children's paper collapses into “some people say” on either side of a question a nine-year-old has no way to weigh, and that teaches doubt rather than understanding.

Daybreak states as fact what would have been true yesterday, last year and last decade, and what is not in dispute among ordinary people. People disagree about what those facts mean and what should follow from them, and that disagreement is exactly what the paper leaves alone. Where the facts themselves are genuinely contested, the story says so, says who disagrees, and stops there.

Every story is rewritten

Nothing is passed through from a wire or a feed. Each story is written for a nine-to-eleven reader in plain language, without graphic detail and without description of injury to individuals. Pictures are original illustrations; the app contains no news photography.

A person signs every issue

Stories are drafted with the help of automated tools and are then read, edited and signed by a named editor before anything publishes. An issue that has not been signed does not go out — that is enforced by the software, not by habit. The editor responsible is [editor name and role].

Hard stories are marked before they are opened

Where a story concerns war, death or disaster, the editor flags it. The reader meets a card before the story that names what it contains and invites them, in the story's own terms, to read it with an adult and to stop whenever they want. The card comes first in the text and first in the audio reading. The story does not begin until the reader chooses to go on.

Reading a hard story alongside a grown-up is what Daybreak asks for, every time, in the card itself. It is an invitation rather than a requirement, because a requirement a child can dismiss teaches them to dismiss it.

A parent can switch hard stories off entirely

Each child profile carries a hard-news setting, held by the account and changed only by an adult. Hard news is available unless a parent turns it off; with it off, that profile does not open a flagged story at all. It is set per child, so a younger sibling reading on the same iPad can have it off while an older one has it on, and the setting follows the child across every device on the family account.

What it does not do is change the paper. Every reader is served the same issue, the same stories, in the same order; nothing is reordered, recommended or generated for an individual child. The setting decides whether a profile opens a card, and nothing else.

The reading voice changes for them

Every story can be read aloud. Two things change around a flagged one. The reading itself is quieter and slower. And the short spoken line that joins one story to the next drops its brightness on both sides — going in and coming out — so a child never hears a cheerful handover into a story about people dying, nor a cheerful recovery straight out of one.

Nothing in the app reaches outward

There is no route through Daybreak by which a child can be contacted by anyone, inside the app or outside it. The paper offers itself; it never sets the reader a task.

What Daybreak knows about a reader

[To be completed against the published data inventory, and to match the privacy policy exactly — same categories, same wording, no more and no fewer.]

Buying it is a grown-up's job

Daybreak is a paid subscription with a free trial. It is set up by an adult, in the adult area of the app, [behind whatever gate ships — describe it here]. A child cannot start, change or cancel a subscription, and there is nothing else in the app to buy.

If you want to ask

Questions about anything on this page, from App Review or from a parent, go to [contact address] and are answered by a person.