Announcing Portsmouth Pulse

Welcome to the Portsmouth Pulse!

The wha’? Who cares? Don’t you know newspapers are dead?

That’s why this is the P-U-L-S-E. It is alive and its heart is beating. Just like the community it serves. So why launch the Pulse? Because we believe there’s a need for a different take on life in Portsmouth. Portsmouth is multi-dimensional, it has many perspectives and it holds many views. In our opinion, there is much that is going on in this vibrant city that we never hear about. Whether it is in our neighborhoods or our communities or our City Hall, too little light is ever shone on these activities.

This is serious stuff! Benjamin Franklin said many years ago,

A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

Ben Franklin

So it is today, perhaps more true than when Franklin warned us of ignorance, that while we are saturated by information on the Internet, talk radio and late night TV, we know less and less about what truly matters. We may be full of minutiae. We risk losing sight of common sense and our rights. We have little sense of the central issues of our time and our community. Time and place. These are what give us a sense of belonging so we may not be enslaved.

The Portsmouth Pulse seeks to focus on Portsmouth and even Rockingham County. We do not want to be clouded by state and national issues. Just local. For this is where we belong. We also seek the broad middle ground, the middle spectrum, of the political debate. Others may focus on the extremes on both the left and right. We believe those views crowd out a reasonable discussion of the middle ground where most of us reside.

Finally, we believe that in the vast marketplace of ideas, there needs to be more curiosity, more discussion and more debate. We seek to promote these qualities in our coverage, in these articles and in our material. We hope you will join us so together we can build a stronger and more resilient sense of community for now and into the future.