You’re Currently Reading The 500th Issue of New News!
The following is not a news story but a statement from the New News editor.
It has been a pleasure to have written 500 issues of New News, and I want to thank all the subscribers who have accompanied me throughout the process. The past three and a half years have improved my writing and reading capabilities. Starting with writing a short news story daily, then to an in-depth news report per week, each newspaper issue is my exploration into the headlines, and each word is the result of great effort and thought.
As time rushes forward, I have found that my collection of news articles is getting rich in content, from the first outbreaks of Covid to the later vaccine development and control of the pandemic, from climate disasters to deadly wars, from scientific endeavours to technological progress, from the ocean to outer space, from society to economics. However, I admit what’s covered less is probably entertainment and gaming.
How New News has “evolved” over the years...
New News started as the result of some coincidental factors. I was stuck at home with nothing to do because of the sudden outbreak of Covid, so I wrote two English novels with tens of thousands of words in two months. In hindsight, it was a childish idea only 8-year-old me would dream up, with sci-fi travelling stories and whatnot. But it’s also because of that experience I went from not knowing how to spell words to enjoying the happiness of writing. However, novels require inspiration, a scarce resource, so my parents designed this project (New News) to keep that pen of mine continuing its work. Every day, I would listen to news topics, find one quite interesting, and jot down the facts I heard in roughly 150 to 200 words. When even good news topics were hard to find, I would look up holidays for that day and explain the background and customs of this particular day.
After sticking to that for a year, I felt what I wrote every day was too superficial. However, I didn’t have the time to go deeper into the background of the events and why they happened, and there was no way to keep track of developments. So, New News changed to a weekly newspaper. After reading relevant information, I wrote the news as an in-depth explanatory article. With the idea that quality came before speed, the word count of the articles increased considerably.
In the meantime, I added English-text recordings and Chinese translations, which helped me improve my oral capabilities and ability to link up Chinese and English vocabulary. I also became more strict in designing the structure of the articles and revising them, as well as making detailed mind maps before writing, which not only improved the efficiency of writing but also improved the fluency of the articles significantly.
The most important part:
Writing news articles in the previous few years was more of a project-based learning process. Starting with an eye-catching headline, I kept asking myself questions, searching for answers, and finally putting my research together into an article. But not as many surprises were popping up in the writing process, as I found out later. The top-down learning process is efficient, but I admit to its limitations. For example, continuing to explore downwards to a certain extent (a systematic study) requires a relatively long time. I have discovered time and time again that after jumping down the rabbit hole of a topic, my foundational knowledge was not enough to enable me to understand 100% of the information, and I will become very reluctant. I understand some facts may be beyond my age and cognition (after all, I’m not a person with an Einstein brain). But I still think if I learned it all systematically, I should still be able to make a breakthrough.
So, I decided to kick New News up a notch once again. I will continue to write about important events in the news, but I will focus more on basic subjects’ systematic learning and organize them into study notes to get posted on my account. Maths, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, economics, geography, and more may get included. I have decided my self-learning process will get interspersed throughout the day, and all notes will be in English. But, I plan to continue recording audio and translating it into Chinese (if time permits) to help more of my peers and students learn together.
Let’s start again from scratch and create a better and brighter future for everyone. Cheer up! Create more surprises for yourself and add happiness and fun to your life. That’s the end of this special announcement from the New News Newsminute. Thank you for reading, and remember to share this article so no one misses out.