About True North
I was chatting before a press conference with a local NBC newswoman in Los Angeles recently. She is a former local and network producer, so the two of us had much in common. I asked her how the news business was going. She responded, “It’s imploding. We’re imploding.” She explained to me that traditional broadcast news is simply fading away. No one knows when the last day will come. The reporter thrust a finger at my laptop and closed by saying, “It’s all going to be on there. On the internet soon.”
She is reading the tea leaves exactly right. Local television news is in a shambles and network television newscasts, once the anchor of public opinion in the United States, are all but ignored by most people. Radio newsrooms are like empty foxholes. On the print side, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and virtually every paper in the country are sitting on mounds of debt, and I mean billions. (Suppressing poorly restrained glee . . . .) These are the dinosaurs of the American news media. Their extinction in their current form is imminent.
In contrast, True North News and Commentary is part of the “new media” wave. We hope to become an independent Internet news and commentary mini-channel. Dinosaur news divisions have always filtered the day’s news for Americans, and decided exactly what was important for us to know. True North will triage the news week as well, except our focus will be on what we think is interesting to you . . . not simply what is interesting to us. We want it to be a one-stop site for interesting commentary, sidebars and original news, as well as an aggregater of news sites that my husband Lowell and I have come to trust for insight, objectivity, and hard news.
Along the way, we’ll be sure to give plenty of unfiltered links to the dinosaur news media outlets listed above. You’ll see that we won’t filter them, but if we do this right, the dinosaurs just might end up not looking too interesting to our readers.
We will offer highlights of pop culture on YouTube, snapshots of the day’s news, and some occasional humor.
Let us know how well we succeed.
