🇺🇸Hilde Kate
Lysiak

On April 2, 2016, nine-year-old Hilde Kate Lysiak was at the Selinsgrove Police Department in Pennsylvania, following up on a vandalism story she had been covering for her newspaper, when she overheard the police chief say he needed to leave for something important. She left first. She tracked down the address. Within the hour, she was at the scene of a murder — a homicide on Ninth Street, three blocks from her home — taking notes, asking questions, and collecting enough information to publish a breaking news story that afternoon on the website of the Orange Street News. The headline read: "EXCLUSIVE: MURDER ON NINTH STREET." She had beaten every adult journalist in town. She was nine years old.

The Orange Street News was Hilde's creation. She had founded it at seven, initially as a family newsletter written with crayons and stapled together for distribution to neighbors in Selinsgrove — the central Pennsylvania town where her father, Matthew Lysiak, a former New York Daily News reporter, had grown up. Matthew had taken Hilde to the Daily News newsroom as a young child, and something had taken root. She began pestering her parents for her own publication. They relented, partly, helping her set up a Facebook page and a website to go alongside the print edition. By the time she was eight, the Orange Street News had subscribers receiving postal delivery. By the time she was nine, she was covering the police beat.

The murder story broke on a Saturday. By Sunday, it had been picked up by national and then international media — not because murder is unusual, but because a nine-year-old girl had beaten everyone to it and showed up in person to do the reporting. Her video response to online critics who told her to go back to playing with dolls became a small viral moment in its own right. Standing in front of a camera she had set up herself, she said: "To the people who say I should be playing with dolls, I am a reporter. And this is my neighborhood. And I'm not going to stop reporting." Journalists around the world posted it. News organizations profiled her. She gave interviews on national television with the gravity of a seasoned correspondent and the matter-of-fact directness of someone who genuinely did not understand why the adults were making such a fuss.

Her father was involved — he edited her copy, managed the website, and helped her navigate the logistics of running a publication — but the journalism was Hilde's. She chose the stories. She made the calls. She showed up at scenes. In 2019, when the family relocated to Patagonia, Arizona, she launched an edition of the Orange Street News there, covering a small mountain town with the same beat-reporter instincts she had developed in Pennsylvania. A local marshal threatened to arrest her for covering a story at the local saloon. She published that story too, with video. The marshal backed down.

In 2019, she won the Junior Zenger Award for Press Freedom, given annually to a journalist who fights for press freedom and the public's right to know. She was twelve. That same year, on May 10, she delivered the commencement address to the graduating class at West Virginia University's Reed College of Media — widely reported as the youngest person in U.S. history to give a college commencement speech. Her address, on the future of journalism, was called by one attendee "one of the year's most inspirational commencement speeches." She was still in middle school.

She became the youngest member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the oldest and largest journalism organization in the United States. Apple TV+ produced a mystery series, Home Before Dark, loosely inspired by her life, premiering in April 2020 with actress Brooklynn Prince in the Hilde role. She published a six-book series for Scholastic and a memoir, Hilde on the Record, in 2022. Each of these things happened before most of her classmates had held their first summer job. Through all of it, she maintained the simple position that had animated her from the beginning: local news matters, truth matters, and no one is too young to report it.