Elizaveta Orlova is a 2026 RJI Student Innovation Fellow partnered with Mirror Indy. The RJI Student Innovation Fellows will be sharing their innovative work throughout the summer in Innovation in Focus.
This summer, Mirror Indy launched a new Kid Correspondents program designed to give young people a chance to tell stories about the communities where they live. Local journalism often asks adults about what is happening in their neighborhood, but we wanted to see what would happen if kids were given the opportunity to answer those questions instead.
Young people notice different things. They spend time in different places, have different concerns and often approach conversations with a level of curiosity that adults lose over time. We believed those perspectives could create stories that feel fresh and authentic. At the same time, we wanted to experiment with a format that felt different from traditional local news. We wanted to combine community reporting with humor, personality and short-form video. The kid reporters will cover real issues and real people, but they will do it in their own voices and with their own style.
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