Mike LaSalle: About Me

Saturday, July 28, 2007

By Mike LaSalle

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I attended De La Salle High School. My pseudonym, “Mike LaSalle”, is an homage to the founder of the Christian Brothers schools, Saint Jean Baptiste de la Salle.

I have an Associate degree in Geology from Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA, and a Bachelors of Arts degree in History from San Francisco State University.

In the early to mid-1990s, I lived in San Francisco and worked downtown in what would later be termed “Multimedia Gulch”. I attended Graduate School in the History department at SFSU for a term, and I also worked a stint as an editorial intern for the weekly newsletter of The Commonwealth Club of California.

My first job developing online computer systems occurred during my 3-years with MZ Media group, the publisher of (among other things) California Business Magazine. Here I developed the company’s first BBS system and learned the outlines of Mosaic – the first HTML browser developed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.

During the period 1996 – 2000, I worked for Pacific Bell Video Services as a Content Manager in support of Pac Bell’s experimental video-on-demand television service hubs in LA and San Jose. (PBVS was later sold off to PrimeOne/Tele-TV, and then to MCI after Pacific Bell was absorbed by Southwest Bell Corp. I still have the T-Shirt: “I Survived the Conversion!”)

In 1998, while living in Marin County, I served as a juror in a high-profile sanity hearing. This hearing lasted 5 weeks, and in the end, I served as Jury Foreman. I mention this because it was the most intensive media experience I have ever been through. In the aftermath of the trial, I was interviewed by the New York Times (May 15, 1998, NYT Reporter Don Terry). I was also interviewed extensively by an anti-death penalty videographer in Marin County. My talking head is available at this link if you would like to see me blabber on about the details of the trial. My bits come in the middle and near the end of the clip.

In October 2001 I launched MensNewsDaily.com. A month after 9/11, I was still in a state of shock, and I felt a need to DO something. On October 12, 2001, Peggy Noonan published a piece in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal called, Welcome Back, Duke: From the ashes of Sept. 11 arise the manly virtues. In the context of my unfortunate experience with the family court of San Francisco, Noonan’s article gave me the idea that MEN — parodied by metrosexuals or declared useless by radical feminists — were still a necessary ingredient in a functioning society. (Come to think of it, Zell Miller’s speech to the Republican National Convention in 2004 contained many of the same themes as Noonan’s piece – though in his case he was specifically speaking of the US solider. But Noonan and Miller are talking in measure about the same thing: the American Male.)

About a week after I read Noonan’s article, I started MensNewsDaily.com.

MND’s mission is to publish intelligently written opinion of interest to men across the political spectrum. The site is designed to highlight men’s issues from an international and essentially conservative or libertarian perspective. Our purpose is to give men a place to pick up their daily news unfiltered by common political correctness.

At MND you will find stories related to the treatment of ordinary men in the modern world – those walking wallets of family court, or the fathers that Hollywood routinely portrays as dolts and buffoons. But you will also find a wide variety of content on other topics, including world and American politics, international events, science, nature, technology, religion, and even Intelligent Design.

The site’s format has changed over time, but the core mission has always been to provide a broad array of daily world news stories and commentary aimed at adult men and the women who love them.

Mike LaSalle
PUBLISHER, MensNewsDaily.com

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