About traverse.news

Why this exists

Traverse City does not have a shortage of information. It has a shortage of one place to put it.

If you want to know what happened, what’s tonight, and who is meeting on Tuesday, you still have to open the Record-Eagle, the Ticker, TCBN, Northern Express, IPR, 9&10, Visit TC, CivicWeb, the library, Interlochen, Facebook groups, and a stack of org calendars. Most people do not. They miss the meeting, the detour, and the show.

traverse.news exists so you do not have to do that circuit. One site. The original story when we have one. Everyone else’s headline when they have one. The night out. The civic calendar. The alert when the road is closed.

That is the whole vision: be the one tab that covers Traverse City and the towns around the bay.

What you will find

Today is the paper. A traverse.news original leads when we have published one. Under that, Around the bay is other desks — Record-Eagle, the Ticker, IPR, 9&10, Northern Express, and local orgs — as headlines that link out. We do not reprint their stories.

Events is concerts, markets, library programs, and nights out. Civic is boards and government only. Schools is important district dates — calendars you can trust, not every bake sale. Sports is area games and sports headlines. Local is useful outbound directories: where to look when you need a number, a map, or an office. We pull from public listings. If a source does not print a time, we leave it blank.

Alerts is official only: crashes, outages, closures, and warnings — Grand Traverse 911 and the same class of notice from the Ticker when it is that kind of post. It is not a Facebook firehose.

Morning email is the same paper in your inbox. One pass before the day starts.

How we write

Original reporting on this site is traverse.news reporting. We do not invent people, quotes, crashes, or events. If a sentence came from another outlet, we say so and we link it.

When a story is a synthesis of the local record, the article ends with those permalinks. That is the paper trail, not a reprint.

What we will not do

We will not scrape a paywall and paste the body. Record-Eagle and anyone else with a wall stay as headline, dek, and a link.

We will not dump group-chat accusations onto the homepage. Complaint pile-ons, doxxing, and unverified claims stay off the public site.

We will not publish a calendar item we cannot point back to.

Who

This is a Traverse City desk. Tips, corrections, and things we missed go through the tip form on this site — or the one in the rail.

Useful local

Standing outbound directories and places live on Useful local. Not news. Not Events. Just the links you reach for twice a week.