CyprusScene is 8 years old and it’s been an amazing journey

By Chris Elliott…

I shared onto my Facebook page a memory poster from a year ago which showed it was the 7 year anniversary of CyprusScene on 27th July and I was amazed at the amount of kind and supportive comments made by so many people so I decided to share this news as a thank you to all our other readers and contributors wherever they may be.

This 8 year journey started with me recovering in hospital  from a hip implant following an accident and being bored I wrote an email to a local newspaper with a message to my Valentine partner and guess what, I won the competition and it was published.

After  this I was curious about writing and encountered the then editor of Cyprus Star and sent him a small article with photos of a leisure day for Margaret Sheard and I and it was published.

Now I had been bitten and started to write and submit articles about charity events and various other subjects many of which were published in this newspaper

Some 10 months later I met the new editor of Cyprus Observer which was being re-launched and was asked to write a few articles which soon became a steady flow, including articles from Margaret Sheard, but more of that later.

Recognising that a a printed newspaper did not travel far and as I wanted to write and promote Northern Cyprus to the world I started the CyprusScene.com website which has evolved and evolved again and now has a great outreach.

Life goes in circles and I felt I wanted to introduce a printed newspaper to compete with the only remaining English language newspaper in Northern Cyprus and we gave all our news and reviews to a contact who printed a newspaper for us for 5 weeks but this proved to be an unworkable arrangement and the agreement was cancelled.

After 2 weeks, not wishing to set up a company to print a newspaper, I then chose to produce one online for downloading and as well as our 8 year journey with Cyprusscene website, we are now publishing this week our 138th issue of our weekly online e-newspaper that readers can download around the world.

By Margaret Sheard…

How the years have flown.  It has sometimes been a bit of a struggle to keep up with the amount of work involved but we have survived for all this time and we will continue for as long as we are able.

I am not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination, although I was nearly always top of the class for essays during my school years, and I suppose my working life as a Secretary/PA has stood me in good stead for putting words on paper and dealing with many different issues for the last 17 years of my working life for my entrepreneur boss.

My initial contribution for Cyprus Observer was an article about Lambousa Market, which I assumed would be a one-off.  No chance, I was soon persuaded to do more, including proof reading the final version of the newspaper, which I admit I did enjoy during the time I contributed to the newspaper. 

Later Chris created the CyprusScene website and so this was another learning curve.  As you can see from the article Chris has written, we ventured into the field of a printed newspaper, which sadly did not work out for us, but during this time I became fascinated with the work done by the page designer and thought it might be something I would like to learn, never thinking that this would come about later, but it did when we decided to launch an online Enewspaper and so another learning curve.   Maybe I unknowingly picked up some hints from the page designer so it was not too difficult to get into the swing of page-making and now I have the task of designing most of the CyprusScene online newspaper, for my sins!

We were told many years ago by Serhat Akpinar of Girne American University, when writing his life story, that when he travelled overseas he liked to read about the country/area he was visiting in the local newspaper.  This stayed in our minds and when we created CyprusScene.com online Enewspaper we  endeavoured to ensure it is a newspaper reflecting life and times in North Cyprus for readers throughout the world, and this is the way we will continue.

Thank you for all the nice comments made, which is very encouraging and we are delighted to see every week more and more people are writing to us and subscribing to the E.newspaper, so we must be doing something right.