Written by year 3 pupils from St. Mary’s
Year 3 children at St. Mary’s primary had a special visitor on Friday, 10th November. Our class teacher, Mrs Brown invited Syd Howarth, editor of Newton News to come in to talk to the class about our community newspaper.
She wanted to extend the work we have been doing in school on writing newspaper reports and the day before we were busy preparing questions we wanted to ask.
On the day itself Syd gave us some very useful tips on what you need to do to create an exciting newspaper report. We learnt lots of useful facts. He is a lovely man and we all learnt lots of new facts. Here are a few of them.
• The Newton News was the first free community newspaper to be produced in this country.
• The Newton News have never employed journalists; instead the community send in reports which we thought was very exciting.
• The companies, who advertise in the paper, are the ones who pay for it, because as we know, the paper is delivered free to all households in Newton Aycliffe.
• The newspaper only publishes reports about great things that happen in our town, avoiding scandalous criminal activity carried out by a minority.
• The paper has 16 pages each week and they never have a problem having enough information to go in the paper.
We are going to be putting these tips into practice next week in our class when we must produce two newspaper reports.
We asked the opinions of some of our classmates on the visit. Here are a few we would like to share. “I found it fascinating to learn how long Syd had been working for Newton News.”
“I really enjoyed it when Syd told us how the paper was made.”
“Syd inspired us to write our own exciting newspaper reports and he made the talk fun.”
” It was exciting to learn how reports are published.”
