It's your turn to be heard.

Introducing Tina.

Tina is a new way to talk about news and politics.

Social media is noisy and it’s often pretty toxic. You can post or share or like whatever you want, but unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of followers, it can feel like you’re shouting but no one is listening.

If you follow the news, you’ve probably heard them talk about polls. But you’ve probably also never participated in one.

Tina is trying to change that. We want to find new ways to include more voices in the conversation, and we hope you’ll join us on that journey.

How does it work?

We’re excited you asked. Each morning, we’ll send out an email with a few questions of the day. A lot of them will be about the news and politics, but we’ll also cover sports, pop culture, tech, business and the best recipes you’ve discovered in quarantine. (Enough with the sourdough, okay?)

Hopefully, you’ll share your answers (privately and anonymously, of course) and then we’ll compile the results. We’ll share the results with you — along with some new questions — the next day. We’ll also ask you for some suggestions on the burning questions you’d love to have answered.

We’re going to try some different things here. Over time, we hope this will give you a place to share your views and be heard — and give us all a better sense of what the American people are actually thinking.

It’s also more fun with more people from more backgrounds with more points of view, so please, tell your tell your family and friends! When you check in on your mom, your dad, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your neighbors, let them know that their voices matter too! We want our participants to look like America.

Okay, but who is Tina?

Tina is named after Tina Sass, my mom. She passed away unexpectedly about two years ago. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her, and I wanted to honor her memory by naming this project after her.

But she’s a deeper part of this story. I grew up loving the news and politics. In our house, the TV was always on during dinner, and it was always set to the news. Politics was a natural part of that, and I fell in love. Hard.

I loved the pageantry and poetry of campaigns, the story-telling of the world as it could be, the assumed reality that We the People could change history if only we worked hard enough. (In high school, I even signed yearbooks “President 2028”. Yikes. Talk about lacking some self-awareness.)

My mom, though, wasn’t as into it. Though she had plenty of views on plenty of issues, she never voted or did anything political. She was so unconvinced that her voice mattered. It’s not that she didn’t care. She did. But she didn’t think anyone else cared what she thought.

I started this project to help give a voice to people like her: folks in far flung places across the country, seemingly a million miles from Washington, who don’t feel heard.

We hope you’ll join us! And again, please tell your friends! ✌🏼