The government's efforts in promoting entrepreneurship among young people in Hong Kong are long on resources but short on ideas. Here's one that looks promising, particularly, in the Hong Kong context.

It's well known that parents are keen to improve their children's language skills but the only way to achieve that goal, as most of them would know, is to encourage their children to read more.

There's no shortage of reading materials written specifically for children. But any parent would know that finding those that would interest children is considerably more complicated that just picking up any story book off the shelves.

Newsela - a New York-based startup - has come up with a novel idea that turns daily news stories into reading material that kids actually like. Established in 2013, Newsela is tailored for students from grades 2 through 12, which are the equivalent of Primary 2 to Form 6 in Hong Kong.

As a business, Newsela offers a premium version on a subscription basis to schools for between $4,000 and $6,000 a year. Its founder Matthew Gross told CNN that the use of news stories as a teaching tool can change the way kids learn.

The platform can help students become better readers while broadening their awareness of what's happening beyond the confines of home and school. Newsela's approach in Gross' words is: "We rewrite the story, sometimes adjusting paragraph lengths, adding subheads, changing the headline and taking out complicated terms to make the content easier for (kids) to understand."

Since its inception, Newsela has accumulated 9 million users, of whom 800,000 are teachers across the United States. Contents are prepared daily by about 100 full-time employees, plus 140 part-time journalists specializing in various fields of coverage, such as science, business and sports.

A Newsela-style platform, either in Chinese or English, would be a useful supplement to civic education that the government is trying to promote in Hong Kong schools. It can help students better prepare themselves for class discussions under the teacher's direction.

Newsela's success in its home market shows that the idea makes good business sense too.

(HK Edition 09/22/2016 page9)