When I do school visits, kids often ask me where I get the ideas for my books. Well, I got the idea for this book from doing school visits!
When I was in elementary school, sixth graders took turns reading the morning announcements over the loudspeaker in the main office. But visiting schools as an author, I discovered that there are a surprising number of schools in America—both private and public—where the morning announcements now take the form of a television show. Schools have professional-quality studios, with microphones and green screens and advanced editing equipment. The kids do everything, from pitching and writing stories to holding cue cards and cameras to reporting and directing the finished product. As a visiting author, I’ve had the honor of being a guest on a number of school TV shows, and the students running them—broadcasting experts all—inspired me to write a book about kids who work on a show like this. I owe a big thank-you to the 2016 news crews at Sunset Palms Elementary and Timber Trace Elementary in Florida for sparking the initial idea. And I’m especially grateful to the “National Pickles” at Tuckahoe Elementary in Virginia, who generously showed me the inner workings of their News @ 9 and even inspired the name for the show in this book.
My research on digital privacy was broad, but I owe many thanks to the Center for Humane Technology, the New York Times Privacy Project, and the contributors to both.
A million thanks to the brilliant Swapna Haddow, Corinne Brinkley, Amy Roza, and Matt Freeman for their thoughtful feedback on the many characters in this book whose lived experience would be different from my own. The always supportive Shawn K. Stout, Elisabeth Dahl, Erin Hagar, and Lori Steel gave me early encouragement, guidance, and cake! Thanks, as always, to Flip Brophy and Nell Pierce for helping my words reach the wider world. I am lucky and grateful to have you both on my side. The same goes for the team at Dial, especially my editor, Dana Chidiac, who asked the right questions, helped me find the right answers, and cheered nonstop along the way.
Finally, lots of love to Federal Hill Preparatory School #45 and to Baltimore City, places I am proud to have called home. I strove to capture the vibrancy of these communities in this book, but there’s nothing like the real thing.