Old News

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FAITH LAPIDUS: VOA’s Christopher Cruise has been receiving an unusual newspaper in the mail. There recently was a story about the sinking of the passenger ship Titanic, and another on Thomas Edison and the electric light he invented. Other stories tell about Russian claims to Alaska, and how British leader Winston Churchill expects trouble from Nazi Germany. As Chris tells us, these stories are from what another newspaper has called “perhaps the most peculiar newspaper in the United States.”

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: The newspaper is called simply “Old News.” One critic said it “provides nuggets of old news from every corner of Western Civilization, changing historical events into great stories of remarkable people.” Another critic said, “you might feel as though you’ve stepped back in time.”

“Old News” reports on events from the nineteen-thirties back to about four hundred years before the start of Christianity. Rick Bromer and his parents began publishing the newspaper in nineteen eighty-nine. Now, he and three other people write many of the stories.

RICK BROMER: “Been doing it for a long time. The basic idea is we’re trying to make history entertaining. We try to tell a story about a particular character in history and we try to structure it like a short story. We don’t fictionalize and we don’t use the usual devices of fiction. But we start with one character who’s got a goal he’s trying to reach and their difficulties. And the story’s all about his attempts to overcome those difficulties. And when he does overcome them and succeeds, or if he fails, that’s the end of the story.