Journalism for kids: An educational approach

This work presents the preliminary phase of the research project "Growing up informed". In particular, the paper is about the first pilot workshop held in Macerata by the University of Macerata and Cronache Maceratesi Junior in order to start investigating the relationship between journalism, children's behavior, and children's education. Starting from a group of 7 children aged from 7 to 11 years old, the workshop focused on different aspects of journalism in order to collect evidences about the link between journalistic activities and children’s consciousness of news making at a local level. The main results point out both the educative value of interviewing in terms of critical thinking development and in terms of developing a wider knowledge of how the community works. Being a pilot, improvements will be made in the final workshop's design, in order to develop a systematic method and coherent tools for an effective data collection.