Working together
By Richard Addis – (Last updated: 15 August 2022)
The Day website does not carry advertising or sponsored messaging1. But we love to work with partners to create resources that schools, teachers, parents and pupils value highly.
Examples of this include:
- Our collaboration with The LEGO Group to create Build the Change Tuesdays focusing on climate change — as part of our new News Detectives weekly worksheets.
- Our work with the University of Oxford to create courses and training in adolescent mental health. We will launch the BrainWaves programme to schools in the spring of 2023.
- Our project to help launch the first-ever Celebration Day writing awards for children in the summer of 2022.
Our philosophy on advertising is, in brief, that it doesn’t work. The model broke some time ago. People are heartily tired of it — especially schools and teachers.
However, joint ventures with commercial partners who share our values and have experience, knowledge and skills to help create new resources that our members will genuinely appreciate are very different.
These projects enable us to reach new audiences and help us give young people unique new resources we would not otherwise be able to make.
They DO work and they are hugely exciting to create together.
In many media organisations where I have worked there has been an unspoken heirarchy. ‘Pure’ editorial content was produced in the newsroom without any influence from business. ‘Advertorial’ content was produced by a special unit in order to attract income — and treated as decidedly third class.
At The Day we completely reject this approach. Some of our best and most creative thinking has been done hand in hand with our partners. They have helped us do a better job as journalists.
We couldn’t do it without them .
- This rule applies to our website which is, of course, for use in schools. We do accept limited sponsored messaging on some of our newsletters to teachers. The distinction from advertising is that sponsored messages are for products and services that we deem to be useful to teachers. And of course, newsletters are being sent to adults, not children.