Grida is both the news and not.

The news is as powerful as the weather outside our windows. It affects how strangers talk to each other, not just the things they're talking about. Grida is meant to be something that tethers us when we are apart; through time, distance, context, and background. In newspapers, paradoxically, it is distance itself that defines solidarity. We have to read - to find out - because we cannot be there.

Pseudonymity is part of what turns distance into solidarity. Everyone enters the paper first by deciding which version of themselves they'd like to be. Authorship, identity, performance, etc., are only secondary to the opportunity of this choice. It is a decision to participate in fiction as an exercise in truth.

Grida is both an artwork and not.

It's often difficult to talk about art because it makes people feel excluded. My favorite art makes me feel with something while being, in some way, apart from it. It creates togetherness through distance. Grida hopefully that. Art also allows the freedom for things to be useless, confusing, and unnecessary but important. In news media, who decides what people need to hear? In this paper, we decide because we make it. We are both building the news and destroying it.

I only feel like an artist sometimes. Sometimes I'm a librarian or a laborer like my parents. And I know sometimes they are artists. I want this to be a place where we can all be artists and poets and journalists or whatever we are together.

-Jerry Ostero

A Letter From the Editor: Jerry Ostero. Published in Grida's first edition.