Happy New Year, and welcome to the redesigned Michigan Progressive! I’m Liano Sharon, managing editor at Michigan Progressive. On behalf of the whole team here, thanks for dropping by, and please have a look around.
We’re really excited about the new site and the new projects we have rolling out over the course of 2019. I’ll post updates here as we get closer to publishing new stuff. Today, here’s a brief tour of the new site.
In our News section, you’ll continue to find the the well researched and extensively sourced articles, opinion pieces, and editorials we’re already known for.
Our Blog section contains shorter news pieces, plus commentary, opinion, explorations and discussion of thoughts and ideas not necessarily fully formed. There is a special place in the milieu of free speech for the journalism found in our news and other sections. There must also be a special place in that milieu for public exploration of controversial, uncomfortable, and difficult feelings, thoughts, and ideas, without fear of personal attacks, and where being wrong is understood as one of the most valuable parts of the conversation, never something to be ridiculed or maligned. Without a space to be wrong in public without fear of personal attack, there is no space to explore or learn together as a community. Our blog is explicitly intend to serve this core feature of democratic (small-d) culture. Comments on our blog will be ruthlessly moderated in service of these principles.
State of the Revolution is our podcast. Every week, we bring together engaged people from across the political spectrum to discuss the politics and policy of the day from a progressive and leftist perspective, often featuring a special guest of particular experience or insight.
In our Videos section, you’ll find videos of community meetings, activist events, interviews and conversations with special guests, and explainer videos, such as our Guide to the Michigan Democratic Party rules, structure, and culture. The first few episodes are up already, with more coming soon, and explainers on other topics in the works for later in the new year. Some of our videos are entirely free to the public, more are available to our patrons at http://www.patreon.com/michiganprogressive.
A culture is a people with a shared set of stories about themselves, each other, the world, and the unknown, through which they understand the world and live their lives. The media today reports the news firmly framed in the worldview of the dominant stories of our culture. With few exceptions, each system based on those stories is failing. Not because each is wrong in its own unique way, but because all are wrong in a similar way: we don’t live in the world our stories describe. Key assumptions in our stories don’t pan out in the real world. Our crisis is not just a climate crisis or an income crisis or a healthcare crisis or a crisis of democracy under attack by authoritarianism.
To solve the problems we face, we have to change the stories we tell ourselves and each other. From climate change to homelessness, healthcare to economics, too many of our stories have evolved to serve the interests of the few over the many, wealth over labor, property over people, corporations over communities.
The purpose of Michigan Progressive is to question those stories that aren’t working, and explore other stories that describe reality more and more accurately, progressively improving their utility as guides to growing sustainable and resilient cultures that serves the many, not the few, labor over wealth, people over property, and communities over corporations – including the community of life on this pale blue dot we all call home.
If you’d like to work with us and contribute to this project, please get in touch through our contact form – we’re looking for journalists, writers, media producers, designers, and all kinds of creators from Michigan and beyond.
If you like the work we’re doing, please consider supporting us by becoming a Patron at www.patreon.com/michiganprogressive.
We’ve got a lot planned and progressing. If you’re interested in grassroots journalism, opinion, and analysis from democratic (small-d), progressive, and further left perspectives, we hope you’ll find Michigan Progressive an increasingly valuable source of information, analysis, and discussion.
In solidarity,
Liano Sharon, Managing Editor