BY AKIRA NORIMATSU

It has been one year since I joined the Youth Forum News Club. For a year I have had a lot of experiences through the club activities. I did not want to have my four years of school life end with only studying and fooling around, so I decided to join a club and have a rich school life. The reason why I joined this club is simply because I wanted to make progress in my English skills. Making the 24th newspaper began as soon as I became a member of the club in May 1999. When I first took part in making a newspaper, I was puzzled by the new experience and filled with anxiety. I wrote an article about Feye Wong, a female singer of Hong Kong, with the title of "The fascination with the great Asian singer Faye Wong." I was very happy and felt the greatest pleasure I had never felt when I saw the completed paper. Here I would like to describe the Youth Forum News I know.

Youth Forum News published its first newspaper in 1991, and has its 10th anniversary this year 2000. The club activities are now managed by twenty-one editorial staff members, twelve of them are from the English Department and nine of them from the Russian Department. The purpose of this club is to get us interested in world events and publish our own opinions together with making progress in our English skills. Our advisors are Professors Mitsuo Kato, Phillip Radcliff, Hideto Hamada and Takashi Yamada. Though the club has its own room for activities, we work mainly at the advisors' offices on the 8th floor of the central building, but especially at Professor Kato's office. His office is always open to us, and there are usually a few members there, so we can expand our knowledge of English or Russian further in addition to our studies in class. In our regular activities, the chief editor writes a newsletter in which are plans for activities and information about events on which we then act. We make a presentation once a week and discuss some newspaper article. Also we study in a group for TOEFL or TOEIC to raise the level of English usage. Also the Youth Forum News Club created a home page two years ago. There are previously published articles in the home page, everyone is invited to contact the page by phone or e-mail at, http://www.sapporo-u.ac.jp/~kato/.

When we make a newspaper, we first decide the themes. What theme we choose depends on us. At first we gather data or take an interview and write articles in Japanese, then we have Japanese teachers check the contents and expression in our articles. After we get the teachers' permission, we put the Japanese into English or Russian. Then we have the articles which have been put into foreign languages corrected by foreign teachers. The next work is to make the layout of the paper. We often get busy in the layout because of delay in other operations, and we usualy have to stay up all night. After a newspaper is perfect, we re-evaluate it. After the re-evaluation, We always hold a party where we celebrate the completion of the newspaper in which we get rid of the stress under which we were during the period of making the newspaper all at once. I think strongly that it has been a good choice for me to have gotten the member of this club. I hope to continue to have a responsibility as a member of the Youth Forum News Club.