What is news?

What is meaningful news?

Our genuine voices are not recognized by society. The principal social institutions address our superficial aspects: self-preservation, economic wealth, and the satisfaction of desire. These are the features of biological life, and they are important for survival and pleasure, but they do not begin to comprehend the full range of our nature.

What appears to be news – what attracts our attention and galvanizes (or saps) our energy – is not new and not even of particular importance. The air we breathe is so omnipresent and so natural to our present existence that we can’t imagine an alterative. We assume that there is nothing we can do about the issues that are most fundamental and affect us most deeply.

How do we find the primary news stories? We need to step back: to follow the road from our origin until we reach the philosophical and spiritual starting place. It is here that we may see what is actually important; and every step forward then becomes a way of contributing to a vision of what is best and most beautiful. The real questions are how one actually comes up with one’s point of view, what interests it defends, and whether it enlarges or diminishes life.

Our goal is to identify the key contemporary situations that are ignored or poorly represented in the existing press. We need to find the stories that are so real and so important that we are entirely resigned to them or do not see that they exist. What if there were a headline that read ‘Politician rewards financial backers’ or ‘Corporation preys on fears’ or ‘City is ugly and sterile’?

What is superficial? Whatever is purely material, economic, external. What is deep? Whatever provides access to truth, beauty, love, good, and the sacred. Let us look for the response that is healing and transformative, that stimulates life, that nourishes interiority and active co-creation of the institutions that structure our everyday lives.

What kind of newspaper is this?
From the first issue of Alaska Humanity News (April, 2005)

What is the paper you now have in your hands?

We aspire to something intangible, something that does not exist but should exist. We are striving for new forms, new features. If you can tell too easily what this newspaper is about we are not doing our job.

Who is to say what is news? A newspaper validates and fixes reality. The headlines themselves are news makers. Conventional papers are interesting, but they report the news of our blandness, our petty struggles, our sour certainties. They report our inability to grasp subtle explanations or higher truths. And they reveal the level of our happiness, the depth of our souls.

Who is to say what is objective, what is real, what is sensible? The press presses the status quo onto our personalities. Society imposes itself on us, and suppresses our hearts and souls.

What if the actual news were right before our eyes, but we didn’t see it? And what if we woke up one day and realized that all along we had been seeing false images and thinking with incoherent thoughts?

We want to go through, and under, and beyond the static news. We want to find the dynamic, challenging, inspiring news that we don’t have words yet to explain: inner news, news of the shattered and the broken, news of the beautiful and the good.

It’s not about the power of the rich. It’s not about the oppression of the powerless. It’s not about the erosion of democracy, or the loss of community, or the profaning of our culture. All these are true. But they are only byproducts and symptoms of the real news.

The news is us. It is in us and flows out of us. This world is an accurate expression of our current identity. It is not the invention of the rich or the famous, the politicians or the executives. We accept our status as peons and pawns but we don’t have to.

The real news is powerful, transformative. We just need to say it, in the public arena. Just by reporting it, it will happen.

Internet sites are too transitory. We want to dip our hands in the ink. We want to participate in the old world, of physical objects that actually exist, that we see in businesses and common spaces and that we can pick up and peruse.

Our paper, our ink, our life: this is a model for communication and participation and creation of the world that is in us but as yet has no way out. And here is also an invitation to you: Join us, as co-creators, or idea gatherers, or as part of the community of readers who are making the news by reframing the questions.