HOT NEWS IN CLASS

By S.C. Gwynne/Los Angeles

Compared with most of her classmates at the University of Southern California, Lisa Ling had an exciting vacation last summer. While others were waiting tables or sunning at the beach, the 22-year-old senior was interviewing the Dalai Lama in his palace of exile in Dharmsala, India. She also spent time in Tibet, where she was arrested for posing as a tourist, but not before smuggling out four hours of contraband video. In Algeria she traveled with an armed escort, and in Iran she was threatened with detention. And she still got back in time for the start of classes in September.

Though few adult TV watchers know her, Ling is a celebrity to millions of American teenagers. In between classes at U.S.C., she works as a correspondent for Channel One News, which sends a daily 12-minute newscast to 12,000 American secondary schools. Since its debut in 1990, Channel One has been a controversial operation, mainly because inside each program it packages two minutes of commercials for products like Pepsi and Reebok shoes. Created by media entrepreneur Christopher Whittle (who sold it last year to K-III Communications), Channel One still raises hackles in some quarters: officials in New York State, for instance, have thus far refused to allow the newscast into schools.

Yet after five years on the air, Channel One News has filled an important niche. The program now reaches 8 million students, or 40% of all teenagers in the country. That is roughly five times the number of teens who watch newscasts on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN combined. And though the mix of MTV-style graphics, rock music and on-air pop quizzes is more sprightly than anything Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw delivers, the newscast is hardly dumbed down.

In contrast to the sports-and-celebrity-heavy format of its early days, the newscast now stresses social issues of interest to young people, with enterprising stories on the homeless, teens in prison and endangered wolves. It has featured interviews with Janet Reno, Benazir Bhutto and Mikhail Gorbachev--who dropped by Channel One's Hollywood studio for the chat. The news program won a prestigious Peabody Award for its coverage of aids, and in 1994 beat out such network competition as Prime Time Live for an award at the Chicago Film Festival.

Perhaps most impressive is its coverage of world affairs. At a time when the broadcast networks are cutting back on their overseas coverage, Channel One has sent its squad of nine correspondents, ranging in age from 18 to 28, to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and other global hot spots. Their stories frequently run three or four minutes--enormous by network-news standards--and have an immediacy that the young audience can relate to. Reporting from Rwanda, correspondent Anderson Cooper took viewers along on a trip through the country in which his car got stuck in the mud and ran out of gas, before reaching scenes of slaughter so grisly he at one point gagged on camera. Cooper was also in Haiti in the days before the downfall of the Cedras regime. His reports had an appealing casualness and intimacy: "I was just listening to some Bob Marley. I was listening to the line, 'I don't want to wait in vain for your love,' and shots went off."

Most of Channel One's staff of 200 have little professional experience, and about half are still in school. "We look for people who can connect to our audience," says David Neuman, a former NBC programming vice president who took over Channel One's news operation in 1992. "We don't want jackets and ties. No pretensions, no poses. That arrogance that you usually see in the news business doesn't work here. If you start acting that way, some 14-year-old out there will see right through it and say, 'You make me sick.'"

Apparently, the strategy is working. Two independent studies have shown that more than 90% of teachers in Channel One schools approve of the show and find it useful; the program has a 99% renewal rate. In one of the studies, the University of Michigan's Jerome Johnston found a 6%-to-8% increase in awareness of current events among students who watch Channel One regularly.

More established news organizations are starting to take notice. Channel One has been involved in a joint reporting project with U.S. News & World Report and 60 Minutes and has an ongoing relationship with abc News. "We are very impressed by their product," says ABC News vice president Bill Abrams. "They do serious stories that are credible, well produced and as good or better than most TV stations." Indeed, the network earlier this year paid Channel One perhaps the ultimate compliment: it hired away Cooper, Channel One's man in Rwanda and Haiti, to become ABC's youngest correspondent.