Have you ever tried to topple most of the usual structures and everyday-routines at your school? If not, experience it just by participating in The International Newspaper Day, which really gives you the chance to organize a school day too unusual to be forgotten by simply everyone, be it student or staff member.

I am teaching at a traditional German Grammar School in the far north-western corner where there are still people learning Latin and even some doing Greek and Hebrew. And mind you, it's not that easy to convince a Latin teacher of allowing some of his students to flunk the Latin lesson as they'd like to produce an English newspaper instead of learning Latin on some special days.

Wolfgang's intention, as he hasn't got such a mean character to wish me something like that or even worse.

On the other hand I must admit that it is an awfully rewarding project, as well for the teachers involved as the participating pupils. Starting at 9.00 h in the morning surrounded by a mere chaos and having, quite astonishingly, produced a real newspaper at about 5.00 am despite all the chaos is quite an experience!

So, to be true, I think Wolfgang's suggestion to hop on the International Newspaper Day train was a good one and I still owe him a drink!

Well, March 1989 saw us in two computer-rooms and two average class-rooms. The two teachers in charge, Hans-J�rgen Westermeyer and I, were surrounded by about 35 pupils from different grades, most of them just were interested in computers, only half of them were actually pupils we had in our classes. All of them were looking for work to be done (in school!!). One computer-room with 12 two-disk drive IBM compatibles was used by the reporters to type their articles with a castrated version of WORD 3.0. The second computer-room had about 8 harddisk micros with the dtp-programme First Publisher on it. Our dtp-freaks were supervised by a teacher of German who was as familiar with the programme as his eight pupils. I didn't have the slightest idea how to work with a dtp-programme and actually it was Christoph, a 12-year-old 8th grader, who told his mates how to work with the programme.

Anyway, nobody knew how, but in fact we had our newspaper ready at about 6 p.m. and had it printed at the local printers'- beers and buns in the nearby pub never had been as delicious as after that mindboggling adventure which had a first happy-end at about 10 pm when the first copies were fetched from the printers. And suddenly there were pupils and teachers with proud faces, full of joy when seeing our first edition of THE ULRICIANUM TIMES: printed on high gloss paper, messy lay-out, but we had succeeded finally - there were already some critical remarks, but all in all we were proud of our newspaper and sold it in the school-yard and in town the next day, getting a positive feed-back but the first readers' letter as well: How could we expect credibility when writing about ecological topics in the paper which was printed on ecologically damaging high gloss paper!

First reaction of Hans-Jürgen and me: how terrible must the other papers have been to make ours first prize!. Anyway, I was sent a ticket, flew over to London, was deeply impressed by the Awards Presentation Ceremony in the Science Museum, was presented a TANDON computer by the sponsors of that Newspaper Day (it still works super!), got to know half of the CAMPUS staff .... and became an addict!

As most of our ULRICIANUM TIMES group members felt a bit ashamed about the quality of our first paper, ambitions came into existence. We worked on different aspects of making a newspaper as part of our extracurricular activities, tried to improve our skills and especially our organization, invented a real system for the texts from typing to lay-out, had a storage system for each page on hard-disks, had persons being responsible for different steps, and thus our second edition in September 1989 was, from our point of view, much better than no. 1. We were especially proud of our two centre-pages, covering the environmental topic which was wanted by CAMPUS 2000. We had Prince Charles' convincing speech, delivered on the Second Conference on the Protection of the North Sea in the centre with articles on how Britain and Germany pollute the North Sea around it - we even send a copy of that edition to Prince Charles, begging his pardon for not having asked for printing permission of his speech beforehand. Our letter finished with the words "Hoping for improved environmental conditions", but the beginning of the letter was much more tricky: How do I, as a democrat in a democratic society, address Mr. Charles Windsor? I started my letter with "Dear Prince Charles" and was criticized heavily by a royalist colleague of mine who wanted me (and was successful) to address him in the correct way: Your Royal Highness. Anyway, the letter and the newspaper must have reached the right address (although the envelope only said: Prince Charles, Buckingham Palace, London) as we received an answer by His Equerry! Commander Alistair Watson, RN, informed us that "His Royal Highness was grateful to you for writing as you did and has asked me to send you his very best wishes."

Our pupils were thrilled and couldn't believe that all this was true!

Well, in the end we got a similar email note to the one six months before: We had won for the second time, now it was International First Prize, and we were invited to participate in the Prize Awards Ceremony! Organizing again, collecting money from parents and sponsors: Finally my colleague and I went over to London by train, accompanied by four pupils who had been chosen by Lady Fortune. And these four had the experience of their school-lives! When do German pupils normally have the chance to speak to Charles Wilson, Editor of The Times, or to a real Secretary of Employment, at that time Norman Fowler? As our students were real reporters, they interviewed these two well-known persons. There was just one little problem, which still hasn't been solved, as we don't know whether it just was a slip of the tongue or wishful thinking:

Tilman, an unusually clever 18 year-old, addressed Mr Fowler as "Mr Secretary of Unemployment" - and about 2 months later Norman Fowler resigned! Part of the mystery was only solved on 28/4/91, when THE SUNDAY TIMES had a two-page special on Norman Fowler with the headline "Family comes first". But anyway, who would have thought that a newspaper of the International Newspaper Day competition could ever topple a Secretary of (Un-)employment?

By the way, on our way back on the train from Hook of Holland to Aurich we wrote the articles for a two-pages special report on the Awards Ceremony which was published in our local newspaper when we returned from our mystery-tour!

Let me cut the long story, which could follow, short: Up to now we have produced five editions of our THE ULRICIANUM TIMES, four English ones as part of what is well-known now as the International Newspaper Day competition, and a German one which we did just for the fun of it in autumn 1990 together with pupils from our partner school in Bitterfeld in the former GDR. That German four-page edition had the highest number of copies we ever published: 40.000 - as it was included in a week-end edition of our local newspaper, which has always helped us tremendously.

We have, of course, changed nearly everything since our first edition. Now we feel like we do have a real organization before we actually start producing the newspaper. There are teams now concentrating on the different pages like the topical International News pages which are produced based on the material we receive during the Newspaper Day, others are in charge of Home News, School News, Sports, Culture etc. Last time, in March 1991, my colleague and I were really unnecessary: the team, consisting of about 45 pupils from grades 9 - 13, is doing the job very skilfully without a teacher's help needed any longer. There are a lot of specialists and some generalists - and I still don't know how to get along with the dtp-programme: from the money we won for the second paper we purchased TIMEWORKS, which satisfied our needs for two editions, then we tried one of the rather professional programmes, who knows which one will come next.

We had a lot of media people in our school during a Newspaper Day, radio and newspapers as well as television, we were represented on the CeBIT, the world's biggest annual computer fair in Hanover where we had an exhibition of our electronic activities and spread about 2.000 copies of our THE ULRICIANUM TIMES no. 4 - but although we have improved our standards tremendously we haven't won with the last two editions - which means that the standard of the other newspapers within the competition has improved as well. And now we do have even more ambitions: we want to win the prize for a third time (according to a local Frisian saying: Three times is Frisian right!). And so I must admit that it's not only me who has become an addict, luckily!

But anyway, learning that we didn't win the March 1991 competition one of the newspaper pupils said: "OK, we'll even produce a better paper next time!" - and that's the spirit I like.

P.S.: I can't blame my problem of having become an addict on Wolfgang Meyer - but: everybody (not only in my little town in the middle of the Frisian prairie) tends to call me Mr. Newspaperday - I mean there are a lot of other things which can be done on the CAMPUS 2000 system, and I have been doing quite a lot of them.

But to establish the usage of email in German schools and to get somebody paying the expenses needs some PR-activities - and I must admit that the International Newspaper Day helps with that, too.

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am looking forward to reading your newspapers in March 1992!

Reinhard Donath

Gymnasium Ulricianum

Von Iheringstr. 15

D 2960 Aurich

West Germany

10001:DLD011

Special thanks to Heide Völckner (Berlin-Aurich) for her comics!