Youth focus for today's newspaper
For the second time, The West Australian invited a group of articulate and highly-opinionated youngsters to take over its editorial floor for a day.
The 13 students from Years 7 to 12 helped produce this special GenZ edition with the support of Children's Week WA and the Meerilinga Young Children's Foundation.
Our editorial panel, made up of members of Generation Z, born after 1995, was selected on the strength of their opinion pieces, letters to the editor or cartoons, also published today.
The decision to hand over control to a group of teens for a day came after the success of a similar experiment last year.
At midday, the students discussed that day's emerging issues and how the newsroom worked with assistant editor Ben Martin.
During a tour of Newspaper House, they met reporters from different sections and asked questions, such as which famous people they had interviewed or about the weirdest story they had written.
Some of the students volunteered to do voice-overs for radio promotions, others helped design layouts and headlines.
Late in the afternoon, they joined acting editor Ben Harvey and other senior staff to offer their guidance on which stories should be given more prominence in the paper.
They chose a photograph of a Light Horse troop re-enactment to run on the front page instead of a picture of politicians from the Vasse by-election because they believed it would be of more interest to most readers.
And they put X-factor contestant Sydnee Carter on the Today liftout cover instead of a US actor because she is a Perth schoolgirl of a similar age to them.
The GenZ editors, who finished by watching their special edition roll off the presses last night, said they were surprised by the amount of work that went on behind the scenes to produce each day's paper.
