XO Times:  A School Newspaper Network

Describe your project:

Children are often a voiceless population in the affairs of their community. 
By turning millions of kids into journalists, this is about to change.

XO Times is an open-source journalism project in association with the Journalism School at Columbia University and the One Laptop Per Child initiative.  It enables children from developing countries to create and publish school newspapers.  The goal is to empower children to participate in community affairs by becoming local reporters.    

 News articles will be developed in a classroom setting and at home, using educational open-source software called Report, which will run on the XO laptops currently being produced by OLPC for mass distribution.  

The newspapers will be shared with classmates, parents and the local communities on www.xotimes.org.  The web site will be categorized in a local geographical manner and will support written, photo, and video journalism.  Readers will be able to comment on and rate articles, allowing the most interesting ones to bubble to the top, perhaps even beyond the site and into mainstream news media.  Individual news articles can also be passed wirelessly from laptop to laptop, allowing other children in the same neighborhood to read articles written by their classmates, even without an Internet connection.

Beyond enriching local communities by enabling children to inform public debate in their area, the project can educate children to think critically about the media, and thus over the long term to strengthen the quality of the local press.

Who would want to use it, and why? 

XO Times will be used primarily by 8 to 16 year-old students from the developing world who receive XO laptops, and by their community.  The Report software will introduce children to the fundamentals of journalism, help them create news articles, and help them publish to www.xotimes.org.  Schools that do not have access to the Report software will be able to create an online newspaper directly via the web site. Classmates, parents and other members of the community will have access to the school newspapers on the web site.

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project? 

Our strength is our diverse and collaborative team.  We have support from the Journalism School at Columbia University, One Laptop Per Child, as well as several other independent experts in the field of journalism and software development.   Our collective resources give us three main advantages:

1) Momentum.  The laptops are in production.  Governments are on board.   
Literally, the power of journalism is about to be dropped into the hands of millions of children: 
a tool to compose, photograph, video-record, and publish.  There is already a working prototype of XO Times and a team of developers and journalists on board to create a finished product.

2) Accessibility.  In the absence of worldwide internet connectivity, students in developing countries may still utilize the power of XO Times by publishing to school servers provided by OLPC or by wirelessly passing articles from laptop to laptop.

3) Seamlessness.   XO Times and the Report software provides a seamless experience from idea to publication.  Even without organized instruction, students can’t help but stumble upon and play with the journalism software in the process of exploring their new laptops.