www.thenorthstarnews.com
The NorthStar News & Analysis is a weekly online newspaper that reports on issues affecting men in the black Diaspora. NorthStar’s intention is to inform black men by publishing news articles, features and analysis that provide comprehensive reports on the status of black men.
The mission of NorthStar is to bring information to black men about black men, without focusing on the negative issues that have become a daily demonizing assault that is the standard in today’s news coverage. The articles will inform black men about education, health, financial, justice and political issues so they can act, not just react in a complex and changing environment.
The North Star was founded by Frederick Douglass Dec. 3, 1847, as a black-owned anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, N.Y. The NorthStar News & Analysis seeks to honor Frederick Douglass and his courage.
Frederick H. Lowe Founder and Editor The NorthStar News & Analysis
I founded The NorthStar News & Analysis after working as a reporter and a writer for three major daily newspapers and an editor of three- trade publications that report on the payments industry.
The Chicago Tribune employed me as a police, general assignment and investigative reporter from 1973 to 1979. I transferred my skills to the Philadelphia Daily News from 1979 to 1987, where I was a general assignment reporter and a business writer. From 1987 to 1995, I was a business writer for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Since leaving general circulation newspapers, I worked as a freelance journalist for several years before SourceMedia, a publisher of trade magazines, hired me as editor of Cardline, a daily online newspaper that covers the payments industry. SourceMedia later promoted me to editor of ATM&Debit News, a weekly publication that reported on the ATM and the debit card industries. In 2010, I joined Networld Alliance as editor of ATMmarketplace.com, a website that reports on the ATM industry.
I was raised in Tacoma, Wash., and I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Washington in Seattle. I am married to Susan M. Miller, a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in Chicago. I have two sons from previous marriages, Joel Patrick and Frederick.
My experience has helped me become a better writer, reporter and editor. My life-changing experience occurred in 1972, shortly after I graduated from the University of Washington.
I was working as a reporter for the New Pittsburgh Courier, an African-owned weekly newspaper. I was walking to a concert at Carnegie-Mellon University, which was near my apartment building, when I was arrested and severely beaten by Pittsburgh police officers. One of the cops screamed, “I hate you niggers,” as he kicked me with his boots and beat me with his fists.
The cops charged me with numerous crimes, but it wasn’t until my court date that I learned police had arrested me as a burglary suspect.
Since I only had lived in Pittsburgh a month, I did not know how to find the street where the burglary occurred, but that did not matter to the cops because they were determined to make me a criminal.
The Pittsburgh Courier hired a lawyer, and he obtained the arrest report. The arrest report provided an insight into the cops’ thinking. The alleged suspect and I were both black men, but that’s where the similarities ended. The alleged suspect weighed 250; I weighed 170. The alleged suspect was 5 feet 5 inches tall; I am 5 feet 11 inches tall. The attitude of the police was any black man would do.
The judge dropped the charges, but the experience of the arrest and the beating has stayed with me all of these years. It is re-stimulated every time The NorthStar News& Analysis publishes articles about black men who have spent their most-productive years in prison only to be released from decades of incarceration after DNA evidence proved they were wrongfully convicted.
Admittedly, my approach to this subject is based on a terrible experience. Years later, I realize my early experience is an accepted demonization of black men as criminals and all of the negative traits that implies.
I founded The NorthStar News & Analysis because black men should have a balanced image of themselves, not the overwhelmingly distorted ones that abound and are so easily accepted.