Children's Express News Agency, Deep in Debt, Verges on Collapse

By Catherine Gewertz

For 26 years, a small army of school-age journalists has been fanning out in cities and suburbs with notepads and microphones, asking questions about things they rarely see in grown-up papers and news shows: things important to kids. Now, the news service that dispatched them is on the brink of collapse.

The nonprofit Children's Express laid off nearly all its staff in late June after the award-winning news agency's board found itself $2.4 million in debt. As August began, the only paid employees were a receptionist and an accountant in the Washington headquarters. But many of its 750 unpaid reporters, ages 8 to 13, were still chasing stories.

Grown-ups were trying to keep the offices afloat. Linda Remsburg, the bureau director of the Marquette, Mich., office, said she hoped the office could stay open as a program of the Upper Peninsula Children's Museum, which...