Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what game. So do you know there's a newspaper
in India that's actually handwritten every single day, handwritten seriously,
like they don't type any of it out. No. I
mean the paper is called the Musliman, which means Muslim,
and it's about a hundred years old and the whole
paper is only about four pages long, but it's written
in Urdu and this like beautiful handwritten calligraphy, and the
(00:22):
subscribers love it. They're about, i want to say, like
twenty copies of the paper that get delivered across India,
and The Musliman receives more than like twenty notes today,
just thanking the newspaper for the service. And in fact,
the owner thinks that if he and his seven employees,
who he actually considers family, like, if they stopped handwriting
the paper, it would lose all of its charm. Wow,
(00:45):
that's that's actually really sweet. And I mean I'm guessing
the subscribers read it because they feel like, you know,
it's a more personal paper, right yeah. And also it's
really cheap, which also helps. But that's the first of
nine facts we've got about newspapers on TODA is nine things.
So let's dive in y Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome
(01:24):
to part time Genius. I'm longas articular. Will Pearson is
out today on vacation, but I've got a good friend
and researcher gave Louisier on the horn with me today
and sitting behind that stack of funny pages, just catching
up on last week's Hagar the Horrible cartoons. That's our
pal and producer Tristan McNeil so gave. Today's show is
all about journalism and papers, and I was curious, did
(01:46):
you guys get a newspaper as a kid. Yeah, we did. Actually,
I grew up in Maryland, so we got the Washington
Post every Sunday, which you know was super important to
me for the comics section. Yeah, you know, my my
parents actually used to have a fight about which paper
to Like my mom got the New York Times because
she liked cross words, and my dad got the local
news journal which was in Delaware and that had comics.
(02:09):
And so we always had too many papers on our
kidschenp table. But I was curious too, like, did you
ever do any sort of journalism in school? Did did
you do like the high school paper or anything like that? Yeah?
I did. I was. I was actually the editor at
our really yeah. I mean, you know, it looked great
on paper for like college applications and stuff, but in reality,
you know, I attended like the super small private school,
(02:32):
so they were only about a hundred kids in the
whole high school. Like my graduating class was twelve people,
so our readership, you know, it was it was pretty tiny.
Did I ever tell you about the paper I started
as a kid? No, So, I mean I was on
my high school paper to it's kind of what led
to Metal Flaws. But um, when I was a kid,
(02:53):
when I was like eight or nine, I started this
paper in my neighborhood called Dogs of my Neighborhood. And
it was with my best friend at the time, and
and you know, the whole idea was that we'd report
on all the funny stories about the dogs in the neighborhood.
And I drew some cartoons, and like my friend and
I like we thought we were gonna make a killing.
And then we got basically like no subscribers, and we
had to put the paper down after the first issue.
(03:16):
But I definitely want to talk about more niche newspapers
and newspaper facts, so I started with that story of
the Mussliman, the handwritten one in India. But what do
you have up your sleeves? Sure? So, like, here's what
I like. And have you ever heard of the Nome Nugget.
It's this paper from Nome, Alaska, and it's actually Alaska's
oldest newspaper. It comes out once a week. And anyway,
(03:38):
this is a story from town and country. But back
in seven there was this group called the Alaska Newspapers Incorporated,
and they had spent a few years trying to buy
the Nome Nugget. You know, they wanted to consolidate it
into their newspaper group, but the feisty Nugget wouldn't have it.
They wanted to stay independent. And A and I was,
(03:59):
you know a little bit here about this. So they
actually and I started a competing paper, the Bearing Straight Record,
And so immediately this rivalry began. The Bearing Straight Record
was well funded, but you know, people continued to rally
around the tiny Nome Nugget, you know, because they love
their local paper. And it's like the little paper that
(04:19):
could you know. Anyway, when the A and I folks
decided to fold the Bearing Straight Record two years later,
somehow the Nome Nuggeters found out, and just as the
executive walked in to break the news, the Nome Nugget
through the Bearing Straight this big surprise party in their
offices for their second anniversary. They had cake and drinks
(04:42):
and you know, obviously the A and I folks were
not happy about this. But anyway, today there's actually a
copy of the final Bearing Straight record that's framed and
it hangs in the Nome Nugget office. Is still man,
they sound feisty, so you know, I I love that
you don't mess with the little guys. And I've actually
got a tell you about this paper that I read about.
(05:02):
It's the Orange Street News, which is sometimes printed as
a four page digest that's distributed to about like two
neighbors and local businesses, but it's also an online site.
And what makes it so special is that it's actually
run by a nine year old named Hilde Kate Lysiac.
And it isn't just some like cuty neighborhood paper like
covering neighborhood dogs. Her paper actually scooped the local news
(05:24):
about a murder in the neighborhood. It's not crazy, Yeah,
it's amazing. So she she got this tip from a source,
and as she put it, then she saw like cops
swarming a house. So she just went up and like
she's plucky and interviewed them and also got the takes
of some neighbors and then she like rushed her story
online under the headline quote exclusive murder on Ninth Street.
(05:47):
And I guess it's amazing because like her, her dad
is a beat reporter and has taken her to the
office of their newspaper and uh. And she was actually
interviewed about her scoop and you know, because she beat
all the local newspapers to it, they were asking like,
how did you do it? And she responded, look, I
got a good tip and I was able to confirm it.
Like she talks like a reporter and she like checks
(06:08):
off on her sources. It's amazing. And apparently her favorite
stories to cover are all the crime ones. She's also
covered a vandal in the neighborhood who has been damaging
plants around the town and uh, and all these other
I guess petty crime stories. It's it's pretty great. Yeah,
that's awesome. I mean if people embraced her or that
they kind of you know, told her that she's too
young to be reporting on this kind of stuff. So
(06:29):
I looked into this too. It's a little of both,
Like when she got a ton of coverage and she
got covered in like Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review all
for that murder scoop. Like, people gone on Facebook and
started criticizing her. But her response was great, like let
me find this quote. She said, uh quote, If you
want me to stop covering news, then you get off
(06:50):
your computers and do something about the news. There is
that cute enough for you? I guess she got tired
of people calling her cute, which is amazing because she's
a little complate. But all right, here's a quick one
for you. And by quick, you know, I actually mean tiny.
Because on February, the Terra No strip paper from Portugal
(07:10):
they published a super slim edition that was get this,
eighteen by twenty five millimeters tall and weighed only a
single graham. So what was this like an edited down
paper or was it like a full paper? What? What
was it? Yeah? It was an exact copy of the
normal edition, but it it came with a magnifying glass
(07:30):
so you can actually, you know, read the thing and
the paper It's sold about three thousand copies that edition,
and it's now in the Guinness Book of Records as
the world's smallest newspaper. That's pretty cool. So I actually
have a quick one for you too. But uh, and this,
this is like something I've been thinking about a lot,
is how the city of Cleveland was originally incorporated with
(07:51):
a different spelling. It was originally spelled c L E
A V E l A N D, like there was
this extra A in there and are now it doesn't
have it. And the whole reason is because of a
local newspaper. So I've actually heard this a long time ago,
and I thought it was because the Plain Dealer, but
apparently it was from the Cleveland Advertiser, this short lived paper,
(08:11):
and basically they couldn't fit all those letters on the masthead,
so they just chopped off the A to fit all
the words on top, and the spelling for the city stuck.
That's great. Yeah, I've got a fact about a paper
that I would love to get my hands on. It's
called The Meat Eater and it was produced from eighteen
seventy two eight one at the Alabama Insane Hospital. And
(08:35):
that's their name, not mine, but so this came out
at a time after Dorothea Dix worked so hard to
move mentally ill people from jails into asylums. But apparently
the paper was really good, Like according to The Atlantic,
it had columns on Darwinism, concert reviews, marriage and death notices.
There were updates about the goings on at the hospital,
(08:57):
you know, including who was being too loud. And there
was this also this little odds and ends section in
the Meteor called Meteoric Dust. But the really interesting thing
is that even though the paper came out with some frequency,
the editors stayed anonymous the whole time, like nobody knows
who was behind this. That's amazing and it almost feels
like a movie, right, you can kind of picture that
(09:18):
with like a little bit of mystery. I actually really
like that. So here's a little paper our researcher, Eaves,
tipped me off on, and I had no idea about it.
It's also historical and it's called The South Polar Times
and it was produced by Robert Scott's men on his
two journeys to Antarctica. Apparently it was a really good
diversion for them just to keep their mind off the cold,
(09:40):
and they brought these massive typewriters with them and reams
of paper and each edition was about thirty to fifty
pages long. Wow, So how many issues did they put out? So?
I think they put out eight issues from the first
voyage and four from the next. But the writing is
supposed to be really really funny, and it's got like characters,
the officer cartoons, watercolors, weather reports. It's supposed to be
(10:04):
really lively like. They also wrote parodies and uh rewrote
lyrics to popular bar songs about their journey. Yeah, and
and even the last edition, which you know must have
been horrific because that expedition didn't end well. The writers
knew their colleagues had run out of supplies and they
were lost in the wild. Even that edition is filled
with jokes that supposedly run a little flat, but they tried.
(10:26):
And uh, Anyway, I just heard about the South Poler
Times this week, But now I feel like I need
to go get a copy of them collected because they
really sound amazing. Yeah, it does. And I know We've
got two more newspaper facts to cover before we choose
a winner here, But first let's take a quick break.
(10:54):
Welcome back to part time genius, where today's topic is
little known newspaper facts. So, Gabe, I I think you're up.
What's your last act? Uh? Yeah? So this is another
defunct paper, but like the South Polar Times you mentioned,
it's particularly interesting as a historic document. It's called the
Prison Times, and you know there there have been a
lot of inmate papers, but this one's especially interesting to
(11:16):
me because it comes from Confederate prisoners that were held
at Fort Delaware. I feel like you're just buttering me
up here by throwing in the word Delaware, but but
I do want to hear this story, baby a little
h The particularly interesting thing is that the paper tried
to stay really objective. So uh. They had this statement
in one of the papers that read, in presenting to
(11:37):
the public the first edition of the Prison Times, we
are aware that there will be many criticisms. Nothing political
will be indulged in it. So basically instead they focused
on fine arts literature. They had the section called our
prison World, which talking about things like how to mend
a torn uniform or you know, tips on how to
(11:57):
get a slightly larger portion of rations. Um. That's kind
of amazing. This might be the most interesting point because
the editors wrote in the paper that they intended to
collect stories from celebrated male and female authors, and I
mean that was super rare for that time period, right like,
and pretty progressive for really any soldiers, let alone Confederates.
(12:19):
But unfortunately there was only one edition of the paper
that's been found so far, so you know, maybe a
little too ahead of its time. That's pretty great, and
it actually reminds me of one story that I read
a long time ago, and we should talk about in
future episodes to get more into the depth of it.
But there's this publisher, I want to say, in Philadelphia
(12:40):
who found a plate for Confederate money and then he
printed out the bills in his paper and and so
that people could just like cut him out of the
paper and use them, and it totally deflated the Confederate currency,
which is just an amazing story. But there's so many
good real newspapers to talk about, Like there's, um, there's
a paper in India, uh I pulled up for this
(13:01):
research that's written exclusively by women and produced by women,
and it tackles all these amazing village stories that most
papers don't get to write about. There's a there's another
paper that comes out and article that deserves mentioned. But
instead I'm gonna use or waste my last fact on
a fake paper that's been circulating for over fifty years now.
And it's the dummy paper you might see on TV
(13:23):
shows from Modern Family or the seventies show. Uh. It's
also in like um movies like Ten Things I Hate
About You or No Country for Old Men. It's really
everywhere and once you spot it, you're going to see
it everywhere. It's apparently produced by a company called the
Earl Hayes Press. And the advantage of this fake paper
is that there aren't any legal hurdles with using you
(13:44):
know this uh, this fake brand. Otherwise, like you know,
companies would have to pay the New York Times or
whoever for licensing fees. But if you look at the
headlines closely, they are so weird, like there's there's a
picture of this woman and it says, uh, she's third
brightest but hard alta see, which which makes no sense.
And then there are all these like other super vanilla
(14:06):
or nonsensical headlines like uh, Valley area records record growth,
like none of these are articles you want to read.
And I mean yet it's it's got to be one
of the most successful papers out there, right, Yeah, I
guess so. Well, you know, there were a lot of
niche papers we've covered today. I think I was really
taking with um the nine year old story, like, I
(14:26):
think that one's amazing. But I also appreciated your use
of the word Delaware and the Confederate Confederate prisoners papers.
So I think I'm gonna have to give you this one.
Well I knew that would work. Well, Thank you so much. Well,
that's it for today's nine Things. We'll be back with
a full length episode of Part Time Genius tomorrow. Thanks
so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
(14:59):
Genius as a production of how stuff works and wouldn't
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(15:21):
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