Hyderabad: When the pandemic hit and school meant logging in online, it left two students with a voracious appetite for news and some extra time on hand thinking about how they could make other teenagers like them become aware of what’s happening around them.
“We knew that reading news is not interesting for kids. So we thought why not do bite-sized news that sums up basic information that can be easily understood by students. So that kind of led to starting the digital platform ‘World Youth Media’,” explains 15-year-old Vedanth Nath who used his coding skills to develop the website along with his brother, Rajveer this April. The two teenagers then asked their friends if they wanted to help out in curating news for the platform and formed a team of 26 students all under 18, each handling different sections of the website like graphic designing, content writing, video editing, etc. The friends group then reached out to other students in different cities and soon the network crossed over to the US as well.
The digital platform World Youth Media breaks down complex information about politics, world affairs, civic issues, environment and inspirational stories in snippets that can be read in under five minutes. The group of youngsters get together online and discuss the trending news of the day which is to be posted on their Instagram and Facebook page. They post dailies which are short videos from categories of national, world, sports and technology news. To inspire kids to think beyond conventional careers, the teenagers also find stories of maverick individuals and post their summaries in their segment called Maverick in a Minute.
“We also do videos about complicated subjects called Power Minutes. One video we did was on Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency. The information is all sourced from news sites,” states Vedanth.
The kids themselves are learning a lot about a wide variety of subjects while they curate the news. “Initially, our parents told us to focus on just our studies. But when we started getting a good response from other students on our social media, they realised we were able to pull it off along with our studies,” recalls Vedanth. “We are also planning to raise funds for educating orphans from the city online. We are privileged, but there are many who aren’t, we want to help them with getting tutors and help out with their syllabus,” says Vedanth.
Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today on Telegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.
Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .