Founder’s Message

Welcome to Latitude News – as the founder, I’d like to share with you why I am personally so excited to launch a news magazine like Latitude News that turns on its head the way the world is usually covered by listening first to what’s happening here, on the ground, in the U.S.

I was born in New Jersey to a Polish father and a Scotch-Irish (and a bit of Cherokee) mother but at age nine (thanks to my father’s job) became somewhat of a nomad. By the time my college years rolled round I had lived in five countries and attended ten schools. I  learned early on how painful national stereotypes can be but also how useful and exciting it is to understand other people’s cultures.

My faithful companion during these itinerant years was my transistor radio – these were pre-internet days and tuning in to Beijing, Moscow, Washington and London live every night was a thrill.

It wasn’t, however, until I spent a year in communist Poland that I decided I wanted to be a journalist. Standing in a line waiting for rationed sugar (and flour and butter and so on), attending underground seminars in monasteries, listening to elderly aunts talk about their experiences during the Second World War, I realized these were the kind of stories I wanted to tell, stories that engaged with audiences on an everyday level and got to life as it’s lived.

My lucky break in journalism came with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. I reported from Poland for an eclectic group: the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the British daily, the Guardian, Marie Claire and the BBC.

Soon after that I joined the BBC in London as a producer. In 1998 I became World Current Affairs Editor, responsible for BBC radio’s specialist foreign affairs team.

My team and I created and oversaw the launch of nine separate shows for three different BBC radio networks, all of them designed to make international affairs relevant and engaging.

The longest running of these shows is Crossing Continents which has a weekly audience of 1.2 million. “One of the strengths of Crossing Continents”, wrote the Times of London,” is that it avoids issues in the abstract sense and instead tackles them in human terms, making them relevant wherever you happen to live”.

This was all good clean fun but I was hankering after the US. I’d always wanted to live here again and once I had a daughter I definitely wanted her to have an American accent!

So when there was an opportunity to come on a yearlong fellowship to Boston we jumped. It was during that year that I became convinced that there are a lot of Americans who want relevant journalism about the world (for more on that particular conviction have a look at Nieman Reports Fall 2010).

The other thing that really excited me was the fact that technology is allowing us, for the first time, to communicate in a meaningful way with our audiences.

Let me explain – all my years in London I was longing to be able to know what interested my listeners. But there was no way that I could. I had to use my gut. I like my gut. It’s pretty well informed. But it’s only one gut. Technology and social media have changed all that. Now we CAN talk with our users. More – we can work with you to co-create assignments and content. Magic!

It was time to say “goodbye” to London and put to use all that I had learned in my years at the BBC about journalism, storytelling and audiences and jump into the American media maelstrom with my own venture, Latitude News.

In March 2011 Latitude News won a Global Digital News Frontier grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation in Washington, D.C.

And a footnote. I ‘m also the author of The Bagel: the surprising history of a modest bread (Yale 2008) Dangerous territory, possibly, for a non New Yorker to tackle but, as it turned out, a treasure trove of a story for anyone wanting to explore unlikely connections between cultures and continents. AND people love to talk about bagels.

If you doubt that statement have a look at what happened when I took part in a web chat in the New York Times  City Room Blog.

What are your international connections? Let us know. Any more closet transistor radio fans out there???

- Maria Balinska

twitter: @mariabalinska
mail: contact@latitudenews.com