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"Children are only in the news, it seems, when they're the objects of fear or the objects of anxiety," says Larry Aber, director of the National Center for Children and Poverty at Columbia University in New York. "Either they're suffering themselves or they're causing others to suffer. Either way, according to the media, they're in trouble."

But the vast majority of America's youths are not in trouble. They're not suffering or causing suffering. They're not violent, not poor, not illiterate, not on drugs. They're not being abused or neglected, killed or maimed.

What they're doing is leading normal lives. You just wouldn't know it from reading the newspaper--or looking at television news.

Many other segments of our society, from ethnic minorities to airline pilots, have long made the same complaint about the distorted portrayal of their lives in the news media. Why, for example, were there big stories on the two fatal airplane accidents that U.S. commercial airliners were involved in last year and virtually no coverage of the more than 11 million flights that took off and landed safely?

The answer to all these criticisms, of course, is that news is news precisely because it's new--not normal, not a daily occurrence.

But a growing number of editors have decided that this narrow definition of news often yields an unfair and unrepresentative depiction of their readers and their communities, and they're starting to do something about that--especially in the coverage of children.

Over the past decade--and increasingly over the past three or four years--newspapers large and small have been creating children's "beats," assigning reporters to write full time about children and their families in much the same way that reporters have long been given beats in science, medicine, religion, the law and many other subjects.

These reporters write about trends or interesting everyday issues--homework, bedtime, child care, allowances, discipline, teasing, overcrowded after-school schedules--without necessarily waiting for a specific dramatic or tragic "news peg" like a high school shooting or the Elian Gonzalez case to hang it on.

Some newspapers have even published lengthy series--in a few cases running for a year or more--on such subjects as "Children First," "Caring for Our Children" and "Saving Our Children."

Most studies show that people get most of their news from television, but only one TV network--ABC--has a children's beat, and local television news programs in particular still seem to focus primarily on the sensational, the sentimental and the superficial when covering children. While stories about children in five major newspapers--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Constitution and Houston Chronicle--increased 37% from 1993 to 1998, the amount of coverage of children on network television remained essentially the same during that period, according to a study by Children Now in Oakland.

The way in which young people are portrayed in the news media is important because it influences how the general public regards them and, as a consequence, how government and other institutions treat them.

Local, state and federal agencies and legislative bodies can restrict children or neglect them, punish them or protect them. Volunteer agencies allocate resources based on the problems--and possible solutions--they see, read and hear about.

With this in mind, a few newspapers--the Denver Post and St. Louis Post-Dispatch among them--had children's beats in the 1980s. But the idea of a children's beat didn't really begin to take root until almost a decade later. Beth Frerking was in the vanguard of the 1990s movement, working out of Washington, D.C., for the Newhouse News Service, starting in 1991, and for the first few years, many of her articles were published by newspapers that subscribed to the Newhouse service and had no other reliable source for stories about children.

Ironically, as more newspapers began developing their own children's specialists, fewer used her stories, and she grew restless. In part because of that shift, she has herself shifted, moving in March from news service reporter to director of the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families--a resource, clearinghouse and coordinating agency for all the reporters who have flocked to her old beat.

The Casey center, based at the University of Maryland, has created a community of children's reporters, complete with their own Web site, e-mail exchange, annual awards and fellowships and--perhaps most important--a communications network that not only enables them to trade information but also to reassure each other that they're doing important work and that they're not doing it alone.