Purpose driven communication | TRC Nexus

March 11th, 2023

Hello this Saturday morning. Thank you for spending a few minutes with us.
 
Every few months we stop to write to you – our strong and growing audience of business leaders throughout the state – about what we see as our purpose.
 
Why do we write a (free) business and political newsletter six days per week, and twice on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
 
In short, we compile and send TRC Nexus as an antidote to news-as-entertainment.
 
Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse (and now current President of the University of Florida), spoke of the this dynamic in recent remarks in Raleigh.
 
Politics and news media has turned into a gladiator-style sport that preys on our worst impulses. Each niche political sphere has its own media venue. It’s an inch wide and a mile deep, offering not information as a civic duty but sharpened content as an emotional experience – usually an angry one.
 
Sasse pointed to this reality as a reason the proportion of Americans who identify as politically moderate has cratered from 26% to 7% in less than a generation.
 
We no longer operate under a set of common facts. When just three networks distilled all the world’s happenings into 23 minutes of content each evening, they provided that set of common facts to the public.
 
Sure, they made some mistakes, but in general the anchors of old sought to deliver fair and moderate news to the mass public.
 
In 1980, 37% of American households with a TV tuned into an evening news broadcast. The only common facts the American public consumes these days is Sunday Night Football. About 6% of the country tunes in.
 
In such a fractured political and media landscape, risk to business abounds. It’s challenging to sift through all the news-as-entertainment muddle and grasp what’s really going on – the truth of the matter.
 
And it’s impossible to satisfy every, or even most, constituencies, which is why it’s folly to publicly wade into political or cultural battles that have no relevance to a business’s core competency. All that awaits is controversy.
 
Still, businesses must understand the landscape as it exists because they live within it. And they must, as best they can, be able to discern the truth behind all the right-and-left political rhetoric.
 
TRC Nexus of course cannot be eyes and ears to everybody, nor do we try. But TRC Nexus can venture to offer you curated content that strips away the baggage to cut to the heart of a matter.
 
In that way, we try to equip business leaders every morning with political and business intelligence that they can grasp and understand.
 
Our content isn’t news-as-entertainment. It’s news that you need to know as a business leader, clear and unfiltered.
 
We wrote to you in July of last year:
 
“No decisions happen in a vacuum. That’s why thinktanks don’t run government. Decisions happen at the intersection of business, politics, and policy.
 
“But the business community can’t maximize its voice in shaping pro-growth public policy without a common understanding of the lay of the land. That common understanding can only come with sophisticated insight into what’s happening behind the scenes – a task that current media just doesn’t care to perform with consistency or precision.”
 
A common set of facts used to underpin most American discourse. At the very least, it can still underpin discourse among North Carolina business leaders.
 
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TRC Nexus is a below-the-radar newsletter that spreads by referrals. We count on our loyal TRC subscribers to spread the word to like-minded business leaders.
 
When the business community has the information it needs to know what is really going on, it can collectively take action to solve real challenges facing North Carolina.
 
We would greatly appreciate it if you shared TRC Nexus with like-minded business leaders interested in making North Carolina better.
 
Please forward this email to them and encourage them to sign up.
 
Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next Saturday.