A handwritten newspaper

[asakiyume]

I get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.

Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.

He calls his paper Andharmanik:

The river Andharmanik is known for some characteristics. The most common myth about it is that if someone splashes the river water in the dark, it emits light and creates an arc.

“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.

The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:

In the past four years, Parvez has cultivated a team of 15 volunteers — labourers, farmers, and fishermen — who work as newspaper reporters, feeding Parvez with the daily happenings in different corners of their district. Once a month, they have a team meeting where Parvez gathers all the news from his volunteers.

Parvez writes headlines and gets them printed out in a big font from a local cyber cafe. He then pastes the headlines onto A3-size papers and writes the rest of the content with a fountain pen. He prints at least 300 copies from a Xerox machine. His volunteers also act as hawkers and distribute the paper in different villages.

You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).

I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.

Parvez at work

Comments

[amaebi]

It really is pretty amazing.

[asakiyume]

I hear so many good stories out of Bangladesh--I feel empowered.

[amaebi]

It cheers me up about a future for journalism, because of what it shows about the instinct for journalism.

By contrast, I learned this morning that in December a lot of Q-Anon-adjacent people were arrested in Germany for plotting to overthrow the government. I’m horrified by the thing itself, and also that I’d been unaware of it.

[asakiyume]

I think I had heard about that vaguely as a headline a while back, but definitely nothing beyond "this thing happened" in the context of right-wing extremism. There is a lot of news out there.

[mallorys_camera]

This is great!!! 😀

[asakiyume]

There are good things out there--and this guy has been keeping it up for four years now.

[sartorias]

That is seriously awesome. Especially now, when one hears of so many newspapers and magazines folding.

[asakiyume]

Right?! He's just **doing** it

I probably won't start a newspaper right now, but seeing this guy actually doing it, keeping up with it, makes me feel like if I decided to, it could work.

[sartorias]

I remember doing a newspaper in sixth grade. It was an enormous amount of work.

[asakiyume]

Nodding. I'm not actually thinking of doing it, but I think if I were, the pride in it and interest in the stories would make it worth the hard work.

[heleninwales]

There used to be a weekly local paper here. It was very local. It just covered our little town and it was in Welsh. But a few years ago the company that owned it (it had been sold to a company that owned numerous titles) just closed it down. However, a bunch of volunteers decided to start their own version. It's now just monthly but it's much better than the old newspaper and has contributions from anyone who wants to write for it and there's a few volunteer editors who take turns to edit the next edition. It's sold in a couple of local shops or you can subscribe. So it can be done if you can get a small team interested.

[sartorias]

The key is a team. As a couple of Jane Austen's brothers discovered when they were in college! And I discovered in sixth grade--it's delightful fun at first, second, maybe third issue, but then a lot of volunteers begin to find the routine a toil, and drop out, landing all the work on one or two. A person has to be really dedicated to keep it going under those circs.

[asakiyume]

Yes, the guy in this story has fifteen people to support him! And yes--volunteers tend to drift away, so you're always needing to interest new people.

[asakiyume]

Fabulous! Yes, that sounds like very much the same sort of thing. So happy to read this.

(I'm not about to start one just yet--I have too many other irons in the fire--but one day maybe)

[cmcmck]

Still recall xerox/roneo/gestetner machines which is how we produced a small self help group mag back in the day before computers were a thing.

I'm glad to see they still have a use!

[asakiyume]

Definitely!

[kore]

Oh, this is amazing!

[asakiyume]

💛💛💛

[sovay]

“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.

I like that idea for a paper.

[asakiyume]

Me too--and the lore behind the name.

[genarti]

Oh, everything about this is fabulous! What a spark of hope and good work -- a ruby that lights up the dark, indeed.

[asakiyume]

I agree! One thing I love is how the whole telling of the story happens without reference to major international media players: no BBC, no Reuters, no NYT. A Bangladeshi mentor inspiring a Bangladeshi local, and the story run in Turkish newspaper, and conveyed to me by a woman originally from India, then South Africa.

I also like to think of how completely NOT AI this story is. AI will not sit and write out a news story by hand ... Not that it's the writing-by-hand that's most important. Like I'd be fine with the guy having a computer or a typewriter! But I love that in the absence of those things, he does it by hand.