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On the level: Climb aboard our Soapbox and have your say

Sudbury.com wants to give you a platform to share you opinion
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Have you got an idea to share? Email your idea to The Soapbox at [email protected]. Photo supplied

Consider this your invitation.

At Northern Life and Sudbury.com we’re always on the lookout for stories. It’s what we do. Our raison d’être is to tell you things — things that’ll make you think; thinks that’ll make you angry or happy or empowered; things that will inform you.

That’s part of our role as a community newspaper and online community information portal. Notice I said “part of our role.”
News media can serve another role as well. In fact, I think we should serve another role.

I was thinking about that role as I drove downtown to our offices the other day. I was humming along Bancroft and listening to one of my favourite podcasts, https://skeptoid.com/Skeptoid (Episode No. 392 “Listener Feedback: Consumer Ripoffs”). Newspapers, I mused, are really good as one-way conduits of information — from us to you. Sure, like every other news outfit, we also publish your letters, which are more often than not responses to things we’ve covered.

As good as they are (and they are important), op-ed pages are pretty one-dimensional.

I was thinking about this, chewing it over, ruminating, if you will.

This line of thinking led me to consider TED Talks. If you haven’t heard of these (TED is an acronym for Technology Entertainment Design), they are basically speeches on a variety of topics by a variety of speakers, some famous, most not. The idea is to give thought-provoking presentations. The tagline for TED pretty much sums up the philosophy:  “Ideas worth spreading.”

Like them or hate them (some are pretty ridiculous), TED Talks do succeed in provoking thought and discussion.

This line of reasoning led me to thinking about the salon movement of the 17th and 18th centuries (although some carried on in other major centres into the 20th century). The purpose of salons was to entertain and educate, to promote the free exchange of ideas on topics from science to art, religion to politics — you know, the biggies.

Salons were limited mostly to the glitterati and intelligentsia (you know, that segment of the population who could afford to think about the biggies because they didn’t have to worry about where their next meal was coming from).

The democratization of the free exchange of ideas takes its purest form perhaps at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in London, England, where anybody is welcome to plunk down a soapbox and harangue passersby about whatever topic or issue is important or interesting to the speaker.

So at this point, I’d basically stopped listening to the podcast. I was too deep in thought about how I could take these somewhat disparate concepts and craft something worthwhile from my ping-ponging train of thought.

What I want to do is explode the concept of the op-ed page. I want to open it up and encourage a more free-form exchange of ideas from a wider variety of people.

This is where you come in. I want to offer a soapbox to the community, a kind of virtual salon or Speakers’ Corner open to everyone to come in, sit down (virtually, of course), read some compelling ideas, respond, argue, debate.

So, at Sudbury.com and Northern Life that’s what we’re going to do.

Introducing … The Soapbox.

Have you got an interesting idea? Perhaps you think Sudbury needs a subway system. Maybe you’re a scientist doing original research, or a pastor with thoughts on atheism. Maybe you’re a stay-at-home parent with tips and strategies for other parents. Perhaps you have thoughts on the widening of Second Avenue, UFOs, virtual reality, philosophy or video games.

Or perhaps you just have a cool story to tell and nowhere to tell it. Really, the sky’s the limit. As long the topic is original and interesting. There are no bad ideas. All you need is a willingness to share, an openness to potential criticism and a bit of a talent for writing.

The point is there are a million stories out there that aren’t being told and we want to help tell them.

Will every idea be publishable? Probably not. But I’m betting most of them are. In fact, I’m betting most of you reading this right now have a story to tell. 

If you think you have something, pitch your idea (email me at [email protected]). Help us make The Soapbox a platform where ideas can grow. Contribute to the marketplace of local ideas. 

Who knows where an idea might lead or what might spring from it. Albert Einstein said his theory of special relativity was inspired by, of all things, the work of 18th century philosopher David Hume.

Climb onto The Soapbox. I can’t wait to see what you have in store.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and Sudbury.com. Email The Soapbox at [email protected].


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Mark Gentili

About the Author: Mark Gentili

Mark Gentili is the editor of Sudbury.com
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