WHEN he was contacted by a fellow computer user, hacker Michael Moonie could not resist bragging about the worm he had created to attack the social networking site Twitter.

Little did the 17-year-old from Louisiana in the USA know that the 13-year-old schoolboy he was chatting to online was Scott Campbell – the executive editor of news website Netnewsdaily.com

Scott and his co-editor Nathan Adam lost no time in publishing their exclusive interview on their news blog, from where the story was picked up and cited on news websites around the world.

As a result of that interview, Moonie was identified and may now face prosecution for his crimes – but Scott is unrepentant: "He knew the risks," he says.

The Michael Moonie interview exclusive has been just one of the successes of the news website – which began as an after-school project for Scott, who is a pupil at Alford Academy, and Adam, who attends Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen.

At a time when many established newspapers are struggling to work out a formula for profitable net news publishing, these two 13-year-olds are currently turning a profit of 150 a month, on a site that costs little more than 5 a month to run.

The site, which has only been running since January, now has a team of contributors, including a 17-year-old student politician, a professional technical writer and a female contributor in her thirties.

The two boys recently turned down an offer of $30,000 (about 18,800) for an 80 per cent share in the site – as well as rebuffing the advances of a web-hosting company that wanted to take them over.

Scott, the son of an IT engineer, said the site was borne of a wish of the pair to gain experience of working in the media: "We started out with a basic blog and it developed from there," he explains. "We wanted to get some experience."

Scott and Nathan spend around an hour each evening working on the site, and between six and ten hours a day at weekends. Their editorial philosophy is summed up by the masthead slogan that adorns the site: "We take the news and mash it up into a more interesting and readable format."

Nathan says: "We try to vary our content as much as we can. I think we have learned quite a lot about how to get a message across and about how to compile news sources. Since we started my writing has definitely improved."

The stories they include are short and snappy – with each on average about 150 words in length.

"We try to keep them quite short because nowadays people on the web don't have a lot of time," Scott explains. "But we do try to check things. We do research using various news sources and if there are statistics we try to verify them."

Fresh £5M in funding to help connect Scottish businesses with academia

var Coremetrics = Coremetrics || {};
Coremetrics.articleTeaserEventID = "SCOT | Article Teaser";
Coremetrics.articleTeaserEventCatID = "SCOT | Article Teaser";

The Net News Daily content takes a very broad approach, with stories about the ceasefire in Sri Lanka, about the South African presidential elections and about a US journalist being held hostage in Iran recently taking the front page slot at the top of the web page.

"Newspapers can be very parochial," Scott explains. " And if you focus only on your own area, people won't keep coming back to your site."

During a potential school siege in Colorado last month the two Aberdeen schoolboys contacted the education authorities and the local police for the latest updates.

And chat show host Jonathan Ross is just one of the celebrities who have agreed to have an online chat with the schoolboy journalists. But it was Campbell's interview with the Twitter worm creator Michael Moonie that earned them and their site the most attention. The scoop led to Net News Daily being cited as a source on mainstream news websites around the world.

The worm exploited a security weakness on Twitter, removing the personalised image at the top of users' profile pages and sending out multiple messages with the words: "Mikey rules".

"I noticed the virus on Twitter was linked to one particular site," Scott explains. "I discovered there was a contact page. I sent him an e-mail and he sent me his instant messaging address – that was the way I spoke to him."

The Net News Daily team asked the hacker: "Do you realise that you've angered and upset a lot of people? To which he replied: "I feel pretty bad about it , but it's not me that left the vulnerability out in the open.... someone else could do something like me but store data, such as their e-mail, name, mobile number and use it for future spamming."

As a result of their investigation, the identity of the hacker was revealed and Mooney, who signed off by saying that the interview was "annoying as f***," may now face prosecution.

After the exclusive gained them extra exposure, the schoolboy editors are proud to have been cited as a source by Sky News – and are thrilled that their site is now included as one of the legitimate news sources cited by Google News.

"We originally got turned down but eventually they accepted us, which we felt pretty good about because they only really accept newspapers and things like that," says Scott, who, as the more technically minded of the two editors, is constantly thinking of ways to optimise the numbers of visitors to the site and to improve their listing on news blogs and news websites.

Adam adds: "Scott is more into the techie side, I am more into content, design and interacting with staff."

And he says producing the website has given both editors valuable experience of journalism and web publishing.

"We started it because we always wanted to be journalists, but at the beginning I wouldn't have dreamt of being able to call someone to confirm a story," he explains. "Now I find it easy."

The two editors admit that they sometimes disagree about a story: "We didn't agree about swine flu," Scott says. "Adam felt it needed to be hyped up, but I don't think we have any reason to panic as much as we are doing."

Net News Daily now earns its creators around 150 a month, which they are banking with the idea of investing in the site in the future. Having turned down an offer purporting to be for $30,000 for an 80 per cent share of the business, they say they aren't ready to hand it over just yet. "I think it has got the potential to grow bigger and I think if we do grow bigger the site will dramatically change," Nathan says.

The two boys remain surprisingly down to earth about their achievements, and have not even told their teachers and friends why they are spending so much time on the web.

Nathan adds: "I haven't told a lot of people about the site but the people I have told are quite impressed."

But while their age does not hamper their style or ambition it does bring inevitable drawbacks when it comes to expansion.

"I hope we will grow bigger but there are time constraints," he says. "Because we are still at school we have exams and a lot of work to do."

Making the news look good, but limited by a lack of resources and real-world constraints

THE fact that two thirteen year-olds in Aberdeen have managed to produce a credible looking news website comes as no surprise to Brian McNair, professor of journalism at Strathclyde University.

Advances in technology have seen the growth of a whole new generation of citizen journalists and the creation of a plethora of new outlets for current affairs.

But while, in some ways, the technology has led to the democratisation of the media, the professor warns there are limits on how much can be done by amateur journalists.

"I think the fact they can do anything that is reasonably well presented and looks credible shows you how much the technology has moved on," he says. "You couldn't have done this kind of thing five years ago – and certainly not ten years ago. And it shows how the internet and online media has dramatically changed the nature of publishing and opened it up to amateurs.

"I'm a big supporter of online journalism – it has changed the traditional, top-down model of the media but there are some risks associated with it."

While new technology has opened up the field to people who are not associated with large news organisations, there are limits to citizen journalism.

"Clearly the downside is they are amateurs – they are not professional and therefore they don't have the ethical constraints that journalists are required to have to be fair and accurate," he explains.

"The technology allows them to plunder the world for information and to aggregate the news from other sources. The question is – can they actually originate their own journalism?"

Although the interview with Michael Mooney, creator of the StalkDaily worm, was a genuine Net News Daily exclusive, McNair points out that it was also a story about the internet.

"It shows if you know your way around it, the internet is a resource which can be used to find things out. But what you won't have is an investigation where a journalist is given resources to travel, to research, to visit archives."

McNair believes the current plethora of news websites is likely to be a temporary phenomenon, with the number of sites dwindling to those which people feel they can trust. The landscape for news websites is also likely to change as established news organisations investigate new ways of making people pay for content.

Nonetheless, he believes the two young editors of Net News Daily are pioneers in a field that will become an increasingly important sector of the media.

"It is a different type of news publishing – but it is here and it is here to stay."