30Kid presses on
8-year-old’s little newspaper, big dreams
THE NATION’S most ambitious newspaper publisher rides around her tiny Pennsylvania town in a bright pink bike and plays with Barbie in her spare time.
No, Hilde Lysiak isn’t incredibly immature. She’s 8 years old.
Hilde has become the talk of Selinsgrove and beyond after launching the Orange Street News last December.
The monthly publication — which Hilde writes, takes photographs for and even delivers — has more than 50 subscribers who shell out $2 for a year’s subscription.
“I really like getting to the truth and reporting it,” Hilde told the Daily News matter-of-factly. The news business runs in her blood. The daughter of former Daily News reporter Matthew Lysiak, Hilde and her big sister spent hours tagging along with their dad as he raced around the city covering shootings, fires and natural disasters.
“It got to the point where they knew all the lingo,” said Lysiak, 37.
Fascinated by the business, Hilde first created her own newspaper using crayons on notepads. Her early scoops caused some rifts in the Lysiak household.
“I found out my wife wanted a new car . . . in her paper!” Lysiak complained.
But Hilde grew frustrated. “It isn’t going anywhere,” she told her dad. “And my hand hurts.”
Hilde said she wanted to produce a real newspaper. Her father agreed to do the typing, formatting and printing, but told her she’d be responsible for all the reporting, writing and photography.
“She took the ball and she ran with it,” Lysiak said.
Hilde was soon showing up at borough council meetings by herself and biking around her 5,300-person town along the Susquehanna River in search of breaking news. The stories started piling up. The four-page paper, named after Hilde’s street, has published pieces about a tornado that swept through town and a bear sighting.
“Hide the picnic baskets Selinsgrove!” read the secondary headline.
She pounded the pavement for days to uncover her biggest scoop so far — a tale about a barking dog breaking up a home burglary.
“I asked for the address at the police station, and they wouldn’t give it to me,” Hilde said. “But I knocked on every block until I found the right one.”
Even before Hilde was the subject of a 2,894-word profile in the Columbia Journalism Review, she drew the attention of Selinsgrove Mayor Jeff Reed.
“A lot of people in town are really impressed,” Reed said, describing Hilde as “intelligent beyond her age” and “very confident.”
“She must have a scanner or something because she shows up at police calls.”
Hilde doesn’t dream of becoming a hotshot reporter. She harbors much grander plans.
“I don’t want to work for another paper,” said Hilde, whose sister Izzy, 11, runs a kids advice column in the local paper, The Daily Item.
“I want to have my own. I want it to be bigger than the Daily News.”
But first, she wants to move — preferably to a big city like New York.
“There’s actually real news there — murders, crime,” said Hilde. “The hardest thing about my paper is trying to get news.”