DAILY TELEGRAPH STORY OVERNIGHT:
CHILDREN READ GOSSIP MAGS OVER BOOKS

Children are reading celebrity gossip magazines such as Heat and Bliss instead of books, especially if the novels stretch to more than 100 pages, a study shows.Boys and girls as young as 11 said they preferred absorbing the exploits of pop stars and models such as Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss to reading books by Jacqueline Wilson or Philip Pullman.

Gossip magazines rated much higher than Shakespeare'

One literacy expert said those children who chose to read such magazines - Heat is aimed at an adult audience - and to surf the internet instead of reading books were damaging their development.Others argued children should be encouraged to read whatever they liked, as long as they were reading.
The National Year of Reading study found Shakespeare was given short shrift by the children questioned, as were "books I am made to read by my teachers".
Instead, they preferred to read song lyrics on the internet, their own online blogs and film scripts. Four out of the top 10 choices for reading were online.
JK Rowling's Harry Potter series was the most popular set of books on the list, followed by Anne Frank's Diary, books by Anthony Horowitz and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis.

Sue Palmer, a literacy consultant, said reading such books helped to develop a child's brain.
"There is research that shows one of the best indicator of future academic success is how much children are reading by the age of 16," she said.
"The trouble with reading magazines and reading online is that you don't get the narrative thread of a story in the same way.
"By reading a book you are building up the stamina to absorb words for a longer period of time. What you are doing is gradually locking brains with the author, which you do not really do in quite the same way when you read chunks of a magazine or chunks of text on a screen.
"This personal interaction going on in your head is the thing that's special about reading a book and the pleasure of that is what, in the end, turns someone into a reader."

The Read up, Fed Up survey asked 1,340 children aged between 11 and 14 to list their 10 favourite and 10 least favourite things to read.
Homework was the most unpopular subject matter, followed by Shakespeare, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Teenagers also said they were tired of reading about the size of thin celebrities, did not favour The Beano, the classic comic, and were unimpressed with Facebook, the social networking site.
The survey also revealed 45 per cent had been told off by adult for enjoying something that was not "proper" reading.
Honor Wilson-Fletcher, the director of the National Year of Reading, said: "We should all appreciate that many young people are reading creatively.
"Teens are challenging our traditional definitions of reading as being all about books, but reading enthusiastically nonetheless."
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said: "It is vital that young people have the opportunity to read widely. It is wonderful that 80 per cent of the teenagers surveyed wrote their own stories and kept up-to-date with current affairs by using sites such as BBC Online."It's wonderful that Anne Frank's Diary is still proving so popular among teenagers."