After midnight, Grand Central Terminal takes on a catatonic, almost zombie-like state. Exhausted commuters are stuck waiting for trains (knowing they’ll have to get back on them again in a matter of hours) and resort to idly shuffling through newsagents’ shops because they’ve got nowhere to sit. After the witching hour, it gets deathly silent.

Which is why I was puzzled at all the shouting that greeted me as I emerged from the subway and steeled myself for the interminable wait for the last train to suburbia. Was it possible I was about to witness to what transit workers so euphemistically refer to as “an incident?”

My mistake. It was just the noise of talking heads on cable television going at each other, reverberating from the TV screens of Hudson News.

The pundits involved don’t really matter, nor does the subject of the so-called “debate.” Even if you have only a superficial familiarity with what passes as political discourse in much of mainstream media today, you already know the score. Accusations were flung, offensive labels were invoked, and oversimplified talking points were repeated ad nauseum, all at ridiculously high volumes.

It got so painful that I had to take refuge in the adult magazines section, where the promise of “Limey Lesbian Lager Louts” on the cover of Juggs seemed a relative oasis of decorum and civility.

The experience made me realize how much mainstream news has become degraded, not only by partisanship, but also by didactic, reductive and absolutist rhetoric. Topics that affect all of us are too often depicted as black or white, liberal or conservative, pro or con, without delving into the complexities and nuances that make up the reality of life.

One of the wonderful things about working at The Issue is that, while there’s a great variety and diversity of opinions, the level of discussion is not only thoughtful and respectful, but also incisive and thorough.

I feel privileged to work at a place where deeper questions are asked and pondered earnestly. Where the trajectory of dialogue is not simply “you believe X, so you must be labeled as Y,” but something more like, “My instincts tell me that this belief is right, but what evidence do we have to back it up? What happens to our initial reactions when we look at this from a different angle?”

Much of my pride in The Issue (and there’s a lot of it) stems from the fact that we aspire to offer you an alternative to mainstream news, not only by presenting multiple sides of a given topic, but also by digging deeper and examining the harder questions.

By navigating the fertile and varied territory of the blogosphere, we also have the advantage of hearing a chorus of impassioned, detailed, and very personal voices. We get to explore not only what different people believe, but why they believe it –that is to say, we get a uniquely intimate look at the personal experiences that shape an individual’s viewpoint.

To me, this “why” of opinion is a unique opportunity for a more elevated and productive form of discourse. If we can see what has makes people think the way they do, if we aim to truly view things from their perspective without prejudice, we’re one step closer to not only listening, but truly hearing each other in a new way. And my hope and my goal is that The Issue will be a gateway to a many more open ears.

We started The Issue with a simple goal: to change media.

Enough with the Britney Spears; enough with the sensationalism; enough with the partisanship. We want a news source that is better. If no one else is going to create it, then we are.

We went through many attempts to capture that essence, the final version of which you can see in Our Mission. But before we broke out the red pen and created our group manifesto, I drafted my own thoughts on what drove me to start The Issue. Here is a (mildly edited) version of that first raw draft where I let myself dream the dream, if only for a moment:

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
– Thomas Jefferson

The effectiveness of a democracy rests on one simple condition: that its citizens be informed. For more than two hundred years, we have celebrated the gift of a government that exists by the people, for the people. But our freedom exists only because we take on the responsibility of governing our government. Without an informed populace, the apparatus of our democracy begins to erode. It is only through an informed and engaged citizenry that a nation can be impelled to greater heights.

Where it is the responsibility of the people to seek truth, it is the responsibility of the media to guide that pursuit. The media – the fourth estate - is the mechanism by which the public informs itself. At the center of a healthy media lies a commitment to truth above all else. News is more complex than sound bites and more colorful than red and blue or black and white. An effective media must filter, process and present the complexity, distilling its essence without losing its subtlety.

In recent years, we have seen rise of a new form of media. It is the largest and most diverse collection of opinions that the world has ever seen. This unruly crowd of clamoring voices is filled with extreme, crude, uninformed opinions, and groupthink. But the blogosphere has also opened a window into every perspective, from the minister to the soldier, the aid worker to the bureaucrat, the student to the scholar. Each perspective is uncensored and untempered, captured in its purest form. Welcome to citizen media.

This array of perspectives has created the opportunity for a new kind of newspaper. The Issue aims to harness all of these perspectives, regardless of political persuasion, in hopes of sketching a three-dimensional view of the world. Our mission is ambitious, but we believe that even partial success will create a valuable resource for engaged citizens.

A democracy will be most effective when the media aims to truly inform its readers, and when the public embraces its responsibility to engage itself. Where the two intersect, lies citizen media. It is here that we stand, attempting to make sense of this convergence. We simply hope that, every time our readers leave our paper, it is with a slightly deeper understanding of the world.

First allow me to introduce myself [this is my first post on The Issue blog, and I think it only appropriate]. My name is Stephen, I’m a Co-founder & editor of The Issue. I can always be reached directly at Stephen@TheIssue.com. I look forward to the creative process of writing, but mostly to the interaction with readers-so introduce yourself and comment at will.

If the purpose of this venue is to interact with our readers by [idealistically?] creating a human being with typed/read words, I’ll start with a confession…. I just watched an episode of ER. Few things are better than DVD on TV, but this guilty pleasure is particularly guilty - I mean, George Clooney threw in the towel years ago. After a particularly nail-biting and seat-edge inducing episode in which myriad medical miracles saved daughters, mothers and grandmothers, I started thinking about how pop culture [and the glorification of medicine therein] defines our perceptions of the health industry.

A decent number of cases in ER are dramatic GSW’s [gun-shot wounds] and MVA’s [motor vehicle accidents]. [I’m down with the lingo] There’s yelling, O neg transfusions and applause. The pupil-dilating traumas are inter-dispersed with the occasional foot-stuck-in-toilet and accidental bee swallow. The critical and anecdotal cases are fun to watch but ignore the the vast majority of ER patients, and in doing so contribute to damaging misconceptions about the health industry. Most people who walk into a hospital emergency room do so because they don’t have a regular doctor or insurance. There’s no other place to go……

No matter your political persuasion, you probably agree that a lack of coverage afflicts the whole system…. but with the way shows like ER portray hospitals and healthcare, it’s pretty difficult for people to understand how and why.

The presence of a blog may have seemed starkly, even inappropriately, absent from The Issue. Our original thought was to be a faceless stamp of quality, promising relevant and interesting blog content. We have come to realize that separating ourselves from this publication compromises some of the most highly regarded and sought-after aspects of the blogosphere: sincerity and voice. The fact that we can feel a human bond by reading a stranger’s written word makes the blogosphere so special. These unlikely connections, forged by the narrative proximity of blog writing, make an often inhuman internet feel very much alive.

To that end, we want to interact with readers and share what is important to the personalities behind The Issue: both the paramount and the trivial. Enjoy the read and join the discussion.

-The Editors