Image The first three books in Scholastic’s Hilde Cracks the Case series. Credit... Mark Makela for The New York Times

The family moved from New York City to Pennsylvania when she was 6, and soon after she started covering minor family events — she broke the news to her father, for instance, that her mother planned to buy a new car — writing the articles on notecards in crayon. But she quickly realized it “wasn’t getting me anywhere” and asked her dad if he could help her start a “real” newspaper. He agreed to handle the printing and the layout if she did all the writing and reporting.

She began by covering her block, then broadened to the neighborhood. Sometimes she gets stories from emailed tips, but mostly she rides around on her bike, asking people if they’ve heard of anything strange going on.

Ms. Lysiak started out charging $1 for a year’s subscription and had a few dozen subscribers; now her print circulation is close to 600 — $20 for a yearlong subscription — with hundreds of thousands of online views. Ms. Lysiak uses some of this money to pay her 13-year-old sister Izzy $25 a week to be her videographer. She credits her older sibling with making her paper a multimedia operation.

Ms. Lysiak is home-schooled and used to spend all her time reporting. “She’d leave in the morning, and we wouldn’t see her until the afternoon,” said Mr. Lysiak. His wife, Bridget, wanted to make sure their daughters had a contingency plan in case their passions changed. They balance out reporting with regular math, science and history lessons for Ms. Lysiak, while Izzy, who has a regular advice column in The Orange Street News and works as an actress, takes 10th-grade-level math, biology and history at the local high school. Ms. Lysiak also has two younger sisters, Juliet, 3, and Georgia, 6.