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.