Publishers sell empty calories, but kids want meatier books

In 1998, when I first presented the concept for the children’s TV series Blue’s Clues to a roomful of television executives, my proposal was met with nearly complete skepticism. At the time, conventional wisdom held that children were afflicted with “short attention spans,” yet I was proposing a continuous 25-minute narrative, which is more than seven times longer than anyone believed the attention of a preschooler could be held. The only way to get preschoolers to engage with a TV series, the executives insisted, was to give them easily digestible bits of content in a “magazine format,” like most other preschool series.

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