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
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,
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
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
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. 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, 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, 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.
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,
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, 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
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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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,
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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 Genius as a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
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