My wife and I have always been news junkies. I grew up watching the "Today Show" with my Cap'n Crunch. From an early age, I have read newspapers every day.

On Sundays, my parents and brothers and sisters would gather around the dining room table, drinking coffee, hastily passing sections of three different papers back and forth, a haze of smoke from my father's and brothers' cigarettes hanging over the crowd. We looked like an old-fashioned newspaper room, just one that hired child labor.

My wife was the same way. Her family was so eager to get the news that she grew up buying the Sunday paper on Saturday evening to get a jump on the morning's reading.

As adults, my wife and I have televisions at strategic locations throughout the house, and half the time, they're tuned to a news channel. When we hear that serious thumping music indicating there's breaking news, we drop everything and sit riveted until we get the scoop. Afterward, we compare details in case one of us missed something.

It's all a little ridiculous, because if something important were to actually happen, it's not like I'm going to spring into action or anything. Like all true junkies, I'm just going to sit there and want some more.

Out in the real world, I'm always on the lookout for something newsworthy, and when something happens, I call my wife, who actually works at a newspaper, to report in.

"A car just fell in a pothole on the boulevard!" I'll bark into the phone, sure that she'll get someone on it. "It's pretty deep!"

My wife takes down the information and, I'm fairly certain, crumples it up in a ball and tosses it in the trash just as soon as I hang up.

Our kids, with all their newfangled technology, have come up with their own news and information networks, but they're much more sophisticated than anything adults have. They don't rely on paper and ink, or even TV broadcasts, but between word of mouth, IM's, Facebook, e-mail, and text messages, news will spread across the "Kids News Network" with an efficiency that would make Brian Williams fall out of his executive chair. KNN, however, focuses only on news of interest to kids.

Kids may not know, or care, whether unemployment figures are up or down. They may not know which politician just resigned in disgrace, and they probably can't name all the places around the world where stuff is blowing up. They can, however, tell you in an instant who broke up with whom, and which boy is planning to ask which girl to the semiformal.

They know which parents in the neighborhood are fighting. They can tell you which dad was hung over Sunday morning. They can you when a family is moving before the parents even know it's coming. And more than anything, they can tell you when a snow day is about to happen.

Last week, my daughter came through the living room as I was trying to get some work done, and announced that due to snow, our school would be opening on a two-hour delay the next day. I flipped on the TV to watch the aggravatingly slow scrawl on the bottom of the screen, waiting for our school name. There was nothing.

"Sorry," I said. "I don't know where you get your information, but you're wrong."

"No, I'm not," she said confidently. "All the kids know already."

"Really, how's that?"

"Well," she said, "Ashley told Hannah, who told Hannah, who told me." (Every fourth girl in our school is named Hannah. Another third are Ashleys. Go figure.)

"Sorry to disappoint you," I said, "but ..."

I didn't get any further. At that moment, her cell phone buzzed. She looked at the message on the little screen and smiled.

"It's on the TV now," she said. "They put it there so the parents will know, too."

As she walked out of the room, I watched the news, waiting and waiting, like the other hopelessly out-of-date parents, for the name of our school to scroll by. It took 10 minutes, but there it was, just as my daughter said it would be. I flipped off the TV set.

My digital cable package costs a hundred bucks a month and includes 11 news channels. It would have been so much easier if I just learned how to subscribe to the Kids News Network.

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