Looking Forward to 2022

In 2020, when NewsForKids.net celebrated its second year, we wrote a blog post about some changes we anticipated in the near future. The main thrust of the expected changes was: more stories, but of shorter length.

For one reason and another, we were never quite able to follow through on that ambition. But we anticipate tackling it again in 2022.

Here is an excerpt from that blog post:

To start with, we hope to be covering more than one story a day, so you can expect to see more stories. But we don’t want to overwhelm young readers, so most of the stories will be shorter.

In order to keep the articles comprehensible and yet short, more background information will be moved to resources like our Fast Facts and the on-hover glossary. We may also be adding new tools to provide additional contextual support.

What may be missing from some of the shorter articles is the broader background of the topic, which is something we’ve tried hard to include in our longer articles.

Though NFK will still have longer articles on important topics, these will probably run just once or twice a week.

Once again, we are announcing this as our goal, this time for 2022. We’re hopeful that now we’re slightly better prepared to follow through on it.

One additional change that readers can expect to see in the new year has to do with images. One of the biggest drains on staff time at NewsForKids.net comes from trying to find images that we are free to use with our articles. It’s not unusual for us to have to pass on a great story simply because we can’t get images for it.

We feel that images play a strong role on the site and contribute greatly to helping readers understand the stories. Using embedded images from GettyImages has allowed us to bring a lot of high-quality pictures to the site, and we’ll continue to use GettyImages.

Unfortunately, images from Getty can’t be used for the front page image of a story. To give us more flexibility in the stories we cover, in the future, when we have difficulty finding an appropriate cover image for a story, we’ll be exploring using a more generic cover image.

This will be a work in progress, and we’ll be learning as we go. But we expect that the cover images will be immediately recognizable as being representative of the main idea behind the story rather than being photographic evidence of the story.

Thanks to all of our readers around the world. We hope 2021 has been kind to you, and that 2022 will be even better. And, as always, a special “Thank You!” to those of you who have supported the site, and helped to spread the word. We truly appreciate your support.

(Image source: NewsForKids.net, [CC BY-SA 4.0], based on work by Bookandcoffee [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.)