The news website with teen editorial leads

The online newspaper run by teenagers.

Scott Campbell works a long day for a 13-year-old. Not only is he a student in Scotland, but he is also an editor for Net News Daily.

When it comes to daily news headlines it seems that Scott's system works well enough to gain a readership around the world as well as advertising revenue that covers all of his overheads and more.

"Me and my friend Nathan are the editors," says Scott. "I'm 13, but we have much older people working for us too, people in their late 30s. There's about eight writers at the moment and occasionally we get approached by more people who want to write for us. We sometimes accept them and see what their articles are like, it's all experience.

"Before anyone gets a story on our website it has to go through me or Nathan and if one of us is unsure about it we will speak to each other and if necessary talk to other people on the site before we publish it. If there are any issues we remove content from the site instantly and it is reviewed. We have a strict editorial process.

"Because we are a blog as well, we have comments at the bottom of each story and people can write their opinion, though sometimes some arguments happen there. We try to keep that to a minimum.

"The advertising goes through a pay pal account that my Mum set up for me. Typically with the advertising we have a set up where people can contact us if they want to advertise. People contact us on twitter about advertising too and we talk to them from there.

Scott Campbell, editor at work in his "office".

"Originally we started this as a basic blog with very occasional posts. We thought maybe we should make it a bit bigger and it grew from there. The readership depends on whether we have a popular story or not, it ranges from under a thousand to about five thousand plus.

"Social media plays an important part in creating and distributing our content. On twitter you have breaking news searches so it's a handy tool for finding things and getting people to see stuff.

"When we look back at our first posts on the blog and compare them with today there's certainly a huge improvement and it's been a great experience. Our writing skills have improved and the site has developed. Our writers are not paid at the moment, it's all voluntary, any money we make from advertising is reinvested back in the site. We are on a host that is only £5 a month so those are our overheads for now.

"Recently we were approached by someone with an offer of US $30 000 for 80% but we turned it down because we thought it was too large a percentage to give away of our website so we like to continue building an upwards trend."

New News Daily online paper

Scott's mother Susan is not surprised by her son's work online. "He's very capable. When he showed me the Net News Daily I thought it was a great idea. Scott's been genuinely interested in computers for a long time, I don't really have anything to do with them, so he's created this by himself. I do keep an eye on who he is talking to, he knows how to conduct himself safely online, but I look out for when he is talking to other adults. I think the whole thing is great, he really does have his head screwed on"

Scott's mother also makes sure that he is not not spending too much time on site upkeep when he should be getting some sleep. Scott points out, "If things run smoothly it's fine but it's when things go wrong it takes time. One time I had to stay up all night fixing things but luckily it was a Friday night. Hopefully it will only go wrong at the weekends."

You can read the headlines according Net News Daily here.