On Friday, founder of Latitude News Maria Balinska led a discussion about how she started her career and came to launch the news site. Balinska started her career working for BBC. At BBC, she learned about all realms of journalism and especially user-related content. She decided to move her family back to America and focus on making a news outlet focusing on international affairs for foreigners in America. Once she had her niche audience, she knew she had a good idea. The importance of appealing to a specific audience is the most important aspect of reporting the news, Balinska says, as well as the volume of content.
Balinska had the desire to make the United States like other countries in terms of how they report on international affairs. She knew of the desire that news aggregators (those who intensely read/share online news) to have more American based, international news media and that is what she did. She simply describes Latitude News as a “local, global mash-up,” a way of making the local news meet the national and international news circuit. There are lots of different kinds of people to appeal to, and she believes her site is able to do that successfully and uses several different methods to do so.
Latitude News uses Twitter to post about 8-10 stories per day about how Americans are being written about in news media around the world. Also, thanks to a Kickstarter grant, they raised $45,000 to start a series of podcasts which are currently being produced by Balinska and her team.
Sammie Says 