Monday, September 6, 2010

My first newspaper

I started my own newspaper when I was 13 years old, with some help from a friend. It was called "Ville's" (a combination of Viktoria and "Ulle," my friend's name).

It was a weekly, and we published it consecutively for about two years.

The content featured hand-written stories about cats and cut-outs of colorful animals.

The official price of each issue was $1, but our lone reader - an older relative - got a complimentary subscription, so we never made any actual money off of it.

Sometimes we used a typewriter for our stories, and then we pasted the white pieces of paper onto something more colorful. We glued, we stapled and we cut and pasted for hours on end.

There were no computers back then, at least not in my house, but we managed to get by.

What we didn't realize back then was that this "play" actually taught us something about the journalism world. We learned how to keep a regular production schedule. We learned to plan cover stories. We learned to write headlines and how to lay out pages, even if it was by hand. And even when my friend got sick and couldn't help out, Ville's never missed a beat.

A few years ago, I visited the lone subscriber, who is now in her 40s. From her storage room, she brought out a large paper box with every issue of Ville's that she had ever gotten.

It mostly looks like junk to me now, but I can remember all the hours of hard work I poured into those pages as a teenager. And I knew, I always wanted to be a journalist.