Due to the number of Covid-19 cases rising, we decided to go for a zoom interview instead. We all were super excited as it was our first time with an online interview.
We started to prepare a list of open-ended questions and shared those questions amongst us to get a fair chance to speak. Exploring the website (vasind.com where Mr. J’s collection is displayed), gave us lots of ideas and our curiosity grew. He has newspapers from 77 countries and in 47 languages.
Butterflies in stomach
We all logged on to Zoom for the interview at the set time. Paula had butterflies in her stomach, where as Smilla was a bit shy. Alexander had prepared an interesting self-introduction where as Karla was proud to call herself a Little Reporter in her introduction.
Our Zoom interview was well organized. We all had our camera turned on and we raised our hand to show that we are ready with our question. Mr. J was very patient with our questions and tried his best to answer them all. We were eager to know him more and started asking our questions. To see his collection online and then to meet him was very exciting, said Paula. Max was surprised to see that Mr. J has been collecting the newspapers from the year 1999, that’s nearly for 21 years.
“It inspired me to think if I can continue with such interest for so long” he felt.
Love for traveling
Mr. J has been living in Denmark for almost 8 years and loves to travel. The reason his collection is constantly growing is because of his love for travelling. He said,
“I bring newspapers from everywhere I go and I have had friends and family who have helped me by contributing to my collection”.
We were surprised to hear that Mr. J has preserved all the newspapers in boxes. Max asked
“What do you do with so many newspapers?”
Mr. J conducts exhibitions of his newspaper collection to develop awareness about newspapers as a form of print media and to create interest in print media.
Favorites
Karla asked Mr. J, which was his favorite newspaper out of his collection. He picked, Sparshdnyan, Braille newspaper which is written for visually impaired. Most of his collections is from India (222 Newspapers) as he comes from there but he has constantly growing collection from Denmark (60 Newspapers) as he is living here now. Some of the newspapers are not being printed any more due to digitalization and Mr. J has some of those in his collection too.
Good research
All of us were very excited to ask Mr. J about the number of newspapers he has from our countries. Smilla asked about Danish newspapers, Karla, about Spanish, Alexander about Polish newspapers, Max about French and Maksim about Russian and finally Paula about Latvian newspapers.
“I am very happy to see that children had done so much research about my website and were curious about my hobby”, said Mr. J. He encouraged us to become his contributors.
LITTLE REPORTER
Little Reporter is a creative writing program for children to master the art of content writing using the practical tools of Journalism. Enquiries and information: visit www.Lcen.dk or write to: learningcentredk@gmail.com
