27 August 2026

Lulu Skantze, Chair of FIPP’s new Initiative for Kids Trusted Media, on nurturing the next generation of readers

While travelling back and forth from London by Eurostar recently, Lulu Skantze decided to do some impromptu market research.

“Both ways I sat at a table with a family of three and in both situations, I saw the same behaviour,” says the co-founder and Editorial Director of Storytime Magazine, the pioneering UK children’s media brand.

“The adults sat down and straight away plugged themselves and the child into screens to watch a series. Within minutes, the child was bored and looked for something else to do. The child was looking for ways to disconnect but there was a lack of options. We tend to rely on screens because we don’t have anything else. What if we did? What if there were loads of magazines for kids to read and play with?”

Providing high-quality, accessible reading material to children as an alternative to excessive screen time is at the forefront of Skantze’s mind as the Chair of FIPP’s new Initiative for Kids Trusted Media.

Launched earlier this year and spearheaded by Yulia Boyle, Chair of the FIPP Advisory Board, it aims to make trustworthy media a meaningful part of every child’s life, offsetting the social platforms, algorithms, influencers, advertising and AI-generated content they consume from an early age. 

The initial four-pronged focus for the Kids Trusted Media Initiative will be to set a global ‘Gold Standard’ for trusted children’s media, including principles around human-led creativity; create clearer pathways for quality media to reach children through schools, libraries and other institutions; establish children’s publishing as a recognised professional discipline by exploring professional credentials for those working in the field; and build and share intelligence about how children and Gen Alpha discover, consume and engage with content.

The initiative was born out of conversations between Skantze, Boyle and FIPP CEO Alastair Lewis during which a simple but crucial question emerged: where are the readers going to come from?

 “It’s not a question we as an industry are addressing,” says Skantze. “If we don’t look after the next generation, if we don’t create magazines for them, if we don’t make a better effort as an industry to help publishers publish more things for kids, we won’t have readers.

“So, the idea for the Kids Trusted Media Initiative came from that – that we need to help publishers to do more. It’s not as straightforward as just putting more magazines on the shelves because we know that kids are not necessarily the buyers. We have to look at who are buying magazines, where are they available and how do we help publishers make magazines more available?”

The perfect fit

You could not find a more determined and passionate campaigner to head the Kids Trusted Media Initiative than Skantze. Storytime, which she launched in 2014 with business partner Leslie Coathup as a magazine prioritising compelling storytelling for children aged 3 to 9, is now read in more than 60 countries.

After lockdown in 2022, they launched Storytime Hub, which allows access to the entire Storytime library – over 1,200 stories and activities, audio, with new additions every month – to ensure readers could tap into content in more ways than one.

Storytime also operates as a social enterprise. The brand makes the print and digital version of the magazine available directly to schools to improve literacy levels and works with local councils to fund kids that are below the reading level to receive the publication at home.

Recently, through a partnership with The Reading Agency for the UK’s National Year of Reading, Skantze placed 800,000 special-edition copies of Storytime into every school and library in the UK.

“What brought me to the role for the Kids Trusted Media Initiative is the fact that I’ve been on this quest for quite some time, trying to find spaces for children’s magazines,” she says. “There are a lot of spaces where we have been the only magazine publishers because we were just curious over how schools are making those decisions. How are licensing partners finding our content?

“And the truth is they are not, because magazines have always been very isolated as a sector in a way. Publishers, audiobooks and other sectors seems to function well together. Magazines, however, don’t get invited and don’t even go there because we feel that we don’t fit anywhere.”

Related: Find out more about FIPP’s Initiative for Kids Trusted Media

Being a gamechanger

Finding ways to bring quality content to kids is, of course, just half the battle. More trusted content needs to be created and Skantze is casting the net wide when discussing the issue with those in the media and beyond.

For starters, those who don’t work in children’s media are not excluded, with Skantze encouraging magazines and newspapers to scour their archives for content that could be repurposed for kids. She also reaches out to other sectors who might be curious about dipping their toes into kids’ media.

“We have a lot of people we work with at Storytime who are from other sectors – like EdTech for example – and want to launch a magazine,” she says. “A lot of other sectors want to make magazines but don’t know how because they don’t have experience.”

Skantze recalls a recent trip to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair where she had discussions with a gaming company keen to learn about publishing.

“They were a little bit surprised how long it takes to make a book because they had no printing experience,” she says. “I told them a magazine takes a lot less time than a book. Periodicals work really well within the universe they’re trying to create.

“It’s so fascinating that there are all these gaps out there. Kids nowadays are never going to go for just one thing. They want every format and we need to offer every format. We want to be that bridge through the Kids Trusted Media Initiative. As media companies, we need to make sure that we are creating content in the formats that our public wants.”

The bigger picture

One of the most important messages Skantze wants to convey is that children’s media is not just about making money.

“Sometimes it takes me a while to explain that you cannot lead with profit when you are creating things for children,” she stresses. “Of course, a lot of people are very focused on the health of their business, and I always want to build sustainable, successful businesses.

“But if your premise is to make the most amount of money on everything you might sometimes compromise the quality of the relationship with the children. I feel kids need to be protected. We need to think about what they are learning with it. What are the benefits? Is it giving them all the tools they need to navigate life?

“Because reading is a big part of the free time the child will have to learn, so are we teaching everything that we can, the best way we can? Are we allowing imagination rather than the selling message to come across?  I feel that social media sort of went the other way.”

Naturally, Skantze has taken note of global efforts trying to limit the access teenagers have to social media, including the UK government’s plans to ban children under 16 from accessing high-risk platforms by early 2027. It creates, she feels, a golden opportunity

“When it comes to the social media bans and screen-free free times governments all over the world are trying to enforce, what’s going to fill that space? I think it would be really nice if we managed to step up to that challenge and say – we can do it so much better because I really believe we can.

“We care so much about what we create. We check our information. We have all the tools we need to become the trusted source of so many things that kids need to access.”

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Tactility and tech

One of the plus-points of prising kids away from screens and towards magazines is the fact that print offers a more tactile experience. Studies have shown that paging through a magazine can have mental health benefits.

“The physicality of print is huge,” says Skantze. “There is a lot of data about how printed magazines engage our senses like no device will ever do because the devices are by nature passive. You are just receptor to the content and you don’t engage with them the same way.

“Just by touching, hearing the sound of the pages or smelling the paper and literally feeling it in your hands – all those things are very natural to us as humans, and they mean that we are present.

“You are engaging with the colours and the pace of that product. It’s not telling you to go faster. It’s actually soothing to have a printed magazine that allows you to just be there, doesn’t tell you to rush and doesn’t tell you that you’re going to run out of battery.”

Skantze makes it clear that, while the Kids Trusted Media Initiative acts as a counterweight to social media consumption, it is in no way anti-tech.

“Tech is very important,” she says. “With Storytime, we are a multi-modal magazine with audio stories and print, and we are working on some games as well. I think it’s about quality. There’s a lot of bad quality online, especially for kids.

“I feel we sometimes spend a lot of our precious time consuming things that we would not have just because it’s so widely available. You go on Netflix and you click on a movie that you didn’t really want to watch.

“If you are creating a platform that people are going to go watch and get informed, I believe there is a responsibility to really honour it. If I read my newspaper, I want to know the journalists behind it have done their job. I want to know it’s true. I want to know the content is good.”

Staying on track

While the task at hand is big one for the Kids Trusted Media Initiative there are examples out there of how children’s behaviour can change radically if they have better access to quality reading material.

“There have been individual initiatives between the media and NGOs to get magazines in libraries and trains and, when they are available, kids were colouring in, they were reading, they were playing,” enthuses Skantze.  

“When it comes to children reading quality content, I think we need to talk to the government, we need to talk to the industry, schools and parents. It is not about telling people this is better or to do this or that.

“We are not the saviours of the world. But I do believe that by coming together in the media and making it possible for more publishers to publish great children’s content, we will make the industry stronger and will better serve the consumer.”

Find out more about FIPP’s Initiative for Kids Trusted Media.