Hilde Kate Lysiak, 9, of Selinsgrove, Pa., publishes both a print and online version of the Orange Street News, and she scooped her adult competition Saturday with news of a homicide. With her 12-year-old sister on standby for photo editing and video support, she’s been covering local news events – and developing an increasingly loyal following in her community as a result.
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Hilde Kate Lysiak says she got a tip Saturday afternoon about something untoward happening on Ninth Street in Selinsgrove. She’s the principal reporter, editor, and publisher of the Orange Street News, a newspaper she started two years ago when her family moved to Selinsgrove.
Hilde says just because she’s 9 doesn’t mean she can’t be a reporter.
Lysiak said Hilde caught the journalism bug when he worked for the Daily News and would occasionally take her along on the job.
“I just like letting people know all the information”, Hilde told The Washington Post on Monday.
“Everybody loved Hilde universally when she began her paper in November 2014”, he said, when she focused on “cute” stories.
She also posted a short video filmed at the scene. Instead, Hilde’s father says, the police chief told her “I’ve got a big story, I’ve gotta go”. ThePost explains. Unfortunately, Lysiak already has detractors, despite the fact that she’s only in third grade.
Although I understand adults who react with concern when they see a nine-year-old so involved with such an upsetting crime (I’m an adult myself, and my first reaction was also unease), some of the more patronizing responses to Hilde’s article really rankle me.
If you want me to stop covering the news, then you get off your computer and do something about the news.
“There, is that cute enough for you?” When she went to the scene, she learned that a 75-year-old woman had been killed in her home.
The 9-year-old also had a fair point to make about people expecting her to do things “a normal little girl” would do. But this budding journalist won’t let negative comments keep her down.
Lysiak said she won’t be giving up her chosen career anytime soon. “I can’t imagine how a nine-year-old can cover a story like that”. Part of growing up is recognizing the extent to which the world can be a awful, violent, devastating place, and considering Hilde, like all of us, has to live in that world, it seems unfair to ask her not to honestly report on it, as well.
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She’s normally unfazed by comments and usually doesn’t read them, he said, but the tea party comment “really lit a fuse under her”. “Why the hell are y’all trying to stifle her when we need MORE kids, especially girls, to break out and do what they’re good at, not what others think they should do”.
