Hilde Lysiak of Brooklyn, NY, has been running her own newspaper, the Orange Street News, since 2014. Considering that she was born in 2006, that means she's put quite a bit of her life into the business.
The News started out as a family newspaper with crayon articles about events in the Lysiak home, but soon expanded thanks to modern media technology. In 2016, Hilde overheard police talking about "something big" and found out it was a murder committed just a few blocks from her home. She went to the crime scene, gathered information and published her report (with the aid of her reporter father) and then went back to film a short video news segment. The News beat other area publications and news outlets by several hours.
Earlier this week, Hilde was in Patagonia, AZ, and was tracking down a story about a mountain lion when she encountered a Patagonia Marshal who stopped her and asked for her identification, then responded rather huffily when she told him she was a reporter working on a story. Rather than remembering that he was talking to a 13-year-old kid, the marshal then threatened to have her arrested and thrown in juvie when she was not as cooperative as he wanted her to be. Out came Hilde's cell phone to record the interaction, and the marshal then threatened her with arrest or problems if his face was recorded and posted online. At some point, he gets the idea he's not going to win and drives off.
The Town of Patagonia, the story at Reason notes, said it reviewed the situation and has "taken action we believe to be appropriate." Since it's a personnel matter they don't go into detail, but you couldn't color me surprised if the "appropriate" action involved one of the marshal's superiors frequently saying the word "dumbass" to him while reviewing the incident.
I would love for Hilde's parents to give her permission to interview the couple dozen or so Democratic candidates for president right now, as I believe she would not come away satisfied with the boilerplate balloon juice they are now permitted to get away with. The rest of the press corps, could, of course, continue to bulldog President Trump over his choice of breakfast cereal. Cue Jim Acosta, shouting from the back of the room: "Mr. President! Doesn't your choice of Rice Krispies -- known for their explosive snap, crackle and pop -- clearly indicate you want to get us into a war with Liechtenstein in order to satisfy Vladimir Putin's displeasure at his inability to locate it on a map?"
In any event, perhaps one of the best statements from Hilde about her journalistic ambitions comes from a September 2015 story in Columbia Journalism Review. In it, she says she doesn't really want to work for a newspaper when she grows up.
She wants to run one.
2 comments:
Despite her, um, tender years, Hilde's BS detector is as finely calibrated as anyone's, and better than most. And when the grumblings amped up after she broke the murder story, she defended herself eloquently -- in the Guardian. (And one can get a monthly hard-copy OSN digest for $20 a year.)
As a journalism school alum, I hope she bypasses that for a good econ or business school degree she she can go ahead and run a paper and hire reporters who think like she does now, rather than the kind of twerps that want to go work for something like Vox.
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