From The Kids Of Oz, The Nonviolent News   

On a typical weekday, 11-year-old Radio Oz correspondent Corey Yearous places a call to his station, WWTC-AM, in Minneapolis. "Mr. Johnson's fourth-grade class is taking a field trip to the science museum today," he reports. Later, second-grader Ria Mykleby reports her school's lunch menu.

Earth-shattering news? Not to an adult. But it does keep the kid community informed.

Altogether, 15 correspondents between the ages of six and 11 work school beats for Radio Oz. Each child reports on events for his or her whole school. In addition, the station has five deejays aged 12 to 14 on its payroll.

WWTC is one of two stations in the country to offer 24-hour-a-day programming, including news, for children. The other is WXJO-FM, the "Imagination Station," in St. Louis.

Mornings on Oz feature music by Raffi, Debbie Gibson and other artists popular with children and reports on school happenings such as environmental projects or the arrival of a new student. The station also airs educational programming for preschoolers. In the afternoon, deejays run contests. Announcers read news features, written by adult staffer Pam Gudmundson, throughout the day.

But Oz news is different. "We're doing the opposite of what everyone else does with news," says Program Director Michael Jaye. "For example, we don't cover murders or traffic accidents. Our philosophy is that kids get enough violence through television and movies. We focus on science and feature stories, and what local kids are doing. Last week we covered a Boy Scout troop that helped clean up a river.

"During the Gulf War, we kept our regular format but provided updates all day. We had a local TV reporter who's also a mother explain the conflict in terms children could understand: that Saddam had moved into the house next door in his neighborhood, that the police couldn't do anything, and now the neighborhood was getting together to make him give it back."

WXJO in St. Louis airs three-and-a-half minutes of news on the hour during morning and evening drive times as well as at noon. A recent feature reported on a boy who found and returned a lost dog and another described how and where corn kernels were first popped. All the music is by children's recording artists, but all the deejays are adults. So far WXJO has no child correspondents.

Based on the number of call-ins and attendance at the three or four promotional events WXJO hosts each week, General Manager Bob Cox estimates he reaches 82 percent of St. Louis households with kids 12 and under.

Two-year-old Radio Oz has been a success, too, according to Jaye, who claims, based on listener calls, that the program has a large audience.

Both stations started children's programming after realizing that there was advertising money to support it. "Kids 12 and under have their own money to spend, and have a tremendous influence on the spending of their parents," Cox says. In addition, both stations saw a need. "Nobody was providing entertaining and educational radio shows to kids," says Jaye.