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BBC School Report News Day 2011

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Helen Shreeve Helen Shreeve | 16:20 UK time, Wednesday, 23 March 2011

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Tomorrow BBC News will be joined by 30,000 School Reporters. These 11-14-year-olds have been learning about journalism at school with the help of their teachers and the BBC. Their task is to complete their own reports by 14:00 GMT and upload it to their school websites. We're linking to them all so BBC audiences can get the news from more than 800 schools.

Screenshot School Report website

With all that's going on in the world today - the Budget, the crisis in Libya, the earthquake in Japan - what will they prioritise? It's difficult for the BBC to make choices about which news stories to cover so how will the students? If you're an 11-14-year-old living in the UK, what is important to you right now?

We recently conducted a School Report survey which gives an interesting insight into the world of some of our young reporters. About 24,000 children from School Reporter schools completed the questions, many relating directly to the 2011 national census.

The results have been sent to the schools that took part to use on News Day. I was struck by the low numbers choosing the answer "being famous" to the question what do you hope to have achieved by the time you are 30. It's the fifth year for School Report and the young people who work with us always confound the media stereotypes.

The range and quality of stories coming in already is amazing: St Albans School Reporters question England football captain John Terry live on the BBC News Channel and Sky Sports News, Hounsdown School investigates heart unit closures, and 15-year-old Mohammad talks sports with students in Afghanistan.

On News Day, there will be seven hours of live TV and radio coverage through the School Report website and red button. And this year we'll make history with the first live television broadcast from the new Studio Block at MediaCityUK in Salford. In London, School Reporters have interviewed the prime minister at a School Report press conference at Downing Street. Ed Miliband did the same at a school in Lambeth. Students have also interviewed Nick Clegg in his office, and there will be interviews with political leaders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We'll be updating a live news feed on our website and our @BBCSchoolReport Twitter feed throughout News Day, so please follow what our School Reporters are doing and let us know what you think.

Helen Shreeve is editor of BBC News School Report.

Coverage of world changing events

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Fran Unsworth Fran Unsworth | 15:50 UK time, Wednesday, 23 March 2011

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It is an understatement to say it's been an extremely busy time in the newsroom and for our teams in the field over the last couple of months in the light of the series of major international stories we have been working on, including the disaster in Japan and the situation in Libya and the wider Middle East.

In my own career I find it hard to recall a period when there has been so many huge stories happening across the world at the same time. Inevitably, this has led to some discussion in the press about our newsgathering budgets being under pressure and how we cope with this.

I have made it clear that we must be able to continue to cover stories of this magnitude and that is exactly what we will keep doing. Despite the strain on the newsgathering budget the BBC has made provision through its wider budget to ensure that in coming weeks we are able to bring these critical stories back to our audiences comprehensively and rooted in eyewitness reportage.

Diary events that we know are coming up are being looked at hard - and there's no doubt that on some occasions we will need to pull back from certain things to make sure our reporting of the biggest stories doesn't suffer.

As we have always done we make tough editorial decisions and allocate our resources accordingly but the last few months have shown that at an extraordinary time we must continue to be recognised for delivering excellent coverage of these world changing events.

Fran Unsworth is the head of Newsgathering.

Reporting from Libya

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Jon Williams Jon Williams | 15:31 UK time, Tuesday, 22 March 2011

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Some weeks ago, I wrote on the blog about the difficulties of reporting from Libya. Shortly afterwards, three of my colleagues from BBC Arabic were seized and abused by the Libyan authorities before being released. I said at the time that Libya was a "tricky" place to report from at the best of times - a month on, it's perhaps an understatement to say it remains so.

Allan Little

Every war has the "journalists' hotel" - the Hotel Continental in Saigon, the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, the Palestine in Baghdad. This time, the Government has corralled around a hundred reporters from around the world into the Rixos Hotel - a smart, Turkish hotel that has just celebrated its first anniversary. It's the garden of the Rixos that you see night after night behind Allan Little and Jeremy Bowen.

But in truth, in recent days, it's become a bit of a gilded cage. International reporters are not free to move around Tripoli - even before the start of the air assault by Britain, France and the United States, the BBC team needed Libyan "minders" to leave the hotel. In recent days, they've not been around - this morning, on Twitter, one of my colleagues in Tripoli likened it to serving a prison sentence, albeit one with a fancy hamam.

During yesterday's Commons debate on Libya, the prime minister paid tribute to the bravery of the British journalists in Libya. But he also suggested that those reporting from Tripoli were reporting under what he called "very, very strong reporting restrictions".

While it's true that we can't see everything we want, we can say whatever we want. Our correspondent in Tripoli, Allan Little, is not subject to censorship, and there is no requirement for him to submit his pieces for approval prior to broadcast. The restriction is on movement - something we have made clear in our reporting.

But reporting restrictions are not just confined to Libya. British military operations are covered by "Defence Advisory" notices - agreed by senior officials from Government and also from the media. Such agreements are not new - the UK Government first sought agreement from the media not to publish information "of value to the enemy" nearly a hundred years ago.

Since 2000, there have been five standing "DA Notices" - the first of which covers current military operations. These are voluntary, and are advisory. On Saturday, the MoD asked British news organisations not to detail timings of planes leaving the UK for operations in Libya during the opening hours of the air campaign, or reveal the detail of weapons being carried - the BBC agreed to the request. You can read what is covered by DA notices here.

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