Magyar News, 1999. szeptember-2000. augusztus (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1999-09-01 / 1. szám
Sneaking into the next decade Today there are so many ways to describe time. There is before and after Christ, but the orthodox Christians are off about a week, the Jews are counting in continuous thousands of years, and if we search we could find others too. The high-tech systems have their own special way to say it but they base time on the gregorián calendar. If we with the Magyar news try to be up to date, then we should use the high-tech formula. Our publication this fall starts crossing into the second decade of its existence. That would be into year second decade, abbreviated would be Y2D. Now isn’t this wonderful? I wouldn’t say that we should stop work and go out into the street and have a nation wide celebration.Though there is something wonderful to celebrate. What started in 1990 survived all the problems that are bom with a new publication. We had financial pitfalls, we had shortages of articles to print, we were in need of writers, also translators. To be very honest we still have these problems. Despite all this the Magyar News is in the hands of the readers every month. Our first issues were published on four pages, now we are up to eight, sometimes to ten pages. For most of the years we were able to illustrate the articles with photographs or other pictures. We are happy for such, and let me say expensive, accomplishment. We would love to satisfy those few who would like to see the Magyar News much bigger, more pages, with color pictures, etc. It would be interesting, probably we could compete with the New York Times - at least on a monthly basis. Sure!? To publish our paper we receive the financial backing from our advertisers. Most of them have been with us starting with the first issue. We wish that they could pay as well as Coca- Cola, or Ford, just to mention some, and I am sure they wouldn’t mind being in the position to do so. To ease the financial burden and the rising cost we put the editing and most of the preparation on computer. In the long run this saved us money but put a tremendous amount of work on us. At this point we usually cry out loud:”Help! Could somebody help?” There are short term advertisers too. They last for one issue, for a halfa-year or some for a year. Since every penny counts, we are happy to have them aboard. Here and there , unfortunately just a few people make donations. They say that they get their copies at the churches or, an other favorite place, at the Drotos Brothers Hungarian Specialties Store. Besides individuals, organizations dip into their treasury box. We are grateful for the generous donation we received from the Calvin United Church. Then we have our writers. They make us happy. It is always a pleasure to read the manuscripts. They come up with subjects many times we don’t even think of. And these are great writings. For these past years 108 person wrote for the Magyar News, not counting yours truly. Some wrote more then once. At the top we mention Dr. Alexander Havadtöy who wrote the very first article, followed by 18 more articles; Erika Papp-Faber with 11; Antonio Procaccini with 10; Father Németh with 6; and Judy Paolini with 5 articles. Historians, scientist from Hungary gave us 11 writings. We do not venture into fields that are about daily, or political events. Sometimes it is unavoidable but we keep it to a minimum. Our goal, besides passing on local news, is to show the Hungarian culture, the traditions and history. We know that for many it is not convenient to pick up a heavy history book and study it. So we try to find parts of it, details that touch a sound in us, that helps understand our ancestors, and something that makes us proud to be Hungarian. We tried to accomplish this by printing almost seven hundred articles. Though we consider the Magyar News to be a publication for the local Hungarian community, it is requested far beyond our state borders. In the United States we have subscribers from 28 states. We also reach Europe, and we have enthusiastic supporters who do distribution on their own, sending copies to relatives and friends in many other countries. We hand out the Magyar News monthly at the Hungarian churches and businesses free of charge, thanks to our advertisers, but to send it to home addresses requires postage and other expenses. Therefore we ask a fee to cover it. Time allowing, we try to keep up with the Hungarian spelling and put the needed accents on the names that occur. This is extra work for us but it is handleable. Some of our readers would like to have some of the articles done in the Hungarian language. It would be nice but to do it efficiently we would need special equipment and somebody to do it. Bear in mind to have a text typeset in a foreign language raises the cost five fold. I don’t think that we could get that extra support. For Hungarian reading one should look for newspapers that are printed in Hungarian, or locally visit the Hungarian library managed by Karolina Szabó. There one could also find books about Hungary in English. Our future plans entail keeping up the regular time of publishing the Magyar News, also hoping for helping hands. We are going to introduce a gift program, specially for Christmas, so one could subscribe for a relative or friend and with the first issue we will insert a card with greetings and the donors name. If you have any remarks or suggestions please contact us. Joseph Stiber Joseph F. Balogh Circulation Manager Editor Page 1
