Although my coworker's anxiety was increasing along with my girth, I stuck to my plan to work until I went into labor, which luckily for everyone happened on a Sunday, six years ago tomorrow.

There was no way I was going to squander a minute of my precious maternity leave, which was over so quickly I couldn't bear to miss my daughter any more than I could stand missing deadline, so in desperate times, I cuddled her close as I finished writing up the news of the day ... which happened to be right next door to where my father had reported the news a generation before, when I was a newborn myself.

Given her roots, my daughter's announcement Tuesday that she'd learned how the news was made didn't surprise me. The only thing that makes it at all remarkable is that she learned it in the KGMB newsroom during one short field trip, as if all the unfortunate hours she'd spent watching me work meant nothing ... well, except that mommy was being lame and working again.

I get it. Things you don't generally find in a print newsroom:

• Yet another cheery morning anchor, this one glamorous — wearing "real" high heels, my daughter gushed — and on top of that, she had a puppy the kids were allowed to pet.

• But beyond the charm generally found wanting among the print hacks, the TV station had something else. The thing that made news: the green screen.

I can't compete. I can cobble together a video that looks exactly like what it is — a home movie. I can edit photos that prove beyond a doubt that I didn't miss any calling as a visual editor. But even if I was attempting to create just a shoddy piece of digital magic, it would take so long for me to to make it appear that my daughter would probably wander away bored from her nonexistent weather map before I figured it out. And on top of that, it wouldn't be news, unlike a real weather report.

I have to say that in this short conversation, I could see why print newspapers are struggling to engage young readers. But I couldn't cry about it because my 13-year-old, randomly inserting his own comments as he saw fit, showed that while newspapers might fear bloggers and other alternative media, TV news people better be watching out for the "iCarly" set.

"I can make you a green screen," he told his sister. "We just need a green sheet."