Bailanysh stands for connection, so how has the newspaper connected to students in the past 3 years?
By: Arina Tuboltseva
Bailanysh News is a news source that has inspired, entertained, and united the school community for over 3 years. It is a great experience for writers and a great source of information for readers. But have you ever wondered how Bailanysh news was created? Who were the originators, and how did they come up with an idea like Bailanysh? I interviewed Erkaiym Saparalieva, who was one of the founders, and she was happy to share the history of Bailanysh News with us.
Back in 2019, when Erkaiym had just joined the school, there was a newspaper called Bailanysh. The curator of the newspaper was a French teacher, Mister Pierre, and there were only 2 members of the newspaper: Ekayim and her previous classmate Alia Mumbetalieva. She was gathering information, and one of the things she did was contact a woman in Siberia, interview her, and together with Alia, who assisted in translating the interview into English, they published similar things to the Bailanysh newspaper (still available if you click here), but it was very small, with only one article published per year. Erkayim was very passionate about having something like a student newspaper in our school so in 2020, when she started her IB diploma program, she had the idea of establishing Bailanysh News as a CAS project. So you could definitely say that her year in Bailanysh back when she was in IGCSE 2 inspired her to create Bailanysh News.
She rebranded the name slightly, and then she started looking for other members who would be interested in creating video-based content for the school, which would be like a newspaper, but in a new format. They formed the team, and then, under Erkayim’s leadership, they created Bailanysh News. They created the logo together and clearly established their goals and ideas, and they thought about what exactly Bailanysh News would be. Then they began gradually building their content. They found the supervisor, and at the beginning, it was Ms. Symbat, but she left the school, so later on their supervisor was Mr. Jacques, and then at some point, it was Mr. Andrew. They were all helping them with moderating the content before it could go to the assembly and YouTube.
They had occasional meetings, so each time they thought it was time for them to publish another video, they would brainstorm what could be in a video and then actually create it. Erkaiym was always in charge of everything, such as communicating with Dr. Grant and ensuring that the video could be shown at the assembly and that everything went well. If they got negative feedback or some things weren’t appropriate for the assembly, Erkayim was the one to take the blame and fix the issues. Together, the team created all of the videos that you can actually still see on their channel, and they are all super happy and proud of their project.
In their second year of IBDP, which is the 2020 and 2021 academic year, they also recruited DP1 to continue the Bailanysh news. Continuing to create content with the new team in April or March of 2021, once the new members were ready, the original team officially stepped down from creating content, and a new generation of creators took over.
Later on, Bailanysh News became focused on Instagram content, but unfortunately, most of the team stepped away from content creation.
In December 2022 we are happy to announce the revival of Bailanysh news as a student-lead website, and hope we can pass down the legacy of the newspaper down to new generations at BIS.
The main goal of Bailanysh News has always been to unite the school community, whether it be through multilingual magazines, videos on youtube, or a website. The news were and still are meant to boost the schools morale, inform the students of events, and entertain.
