What Works

By Ellen Clegg

When Mukhtar Ibrahim, a longtime Minnesota journalist, launched the digital nonprofit Sahan Journal in the summer of 2019, he was determined to fill in the blanks in coverage of the state’s vibrant immigrant communities. Actually, it was more of a relaunch. Ibrahim, a former reporter for Minnesota Public Radio and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, first put up a website in 2013 in order to provide “authoritative, fair and original reporting and analysis about issues related to Somalis in the diaspora, in East Africa, and the greater Horn of Africa.”

His early website showed potential, but without the support of an organization or wealthy donor, publishing out of his apartment in St. Paul on a voluntary basis got old. He turned his attention back to his journalism career, but his dream remained. (On a pre-pandemic visit to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, I noticed that Ibrahim’s portrait is displayed in an array of prominent alumni biographies in Murphy Hall, home to the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.) Ultimately, Ibrahim got the backing he needed from Minnesota Public Radio, which agreed to pay his salary for 18 months, and found space to create his own newsroom at the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media in St. Paul, an incubator for new ventures. Funders and partnerships now include the Emerson Collective, the Knight Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Facebook Journalism Project, among others.

A recent look at the Sahan Journal home page shows a broad range of coverage, with compelling stories and photos on the Minneapolis City Council race, an investigation into failing charter schools, a deep dive into data that show how immigrant communities are contributing to the Minnesota economy, and four videos explaining the Covid-19 vaccination process in Spanish, Somali, Hmong, and English. Eight years after his first foray into digital publishing, the timing seems right. As Ibrahim explains his mission on the Journal website, “Nearly all of Minnesota’s population growth is coming from populations of color; since 2010 the non-Hispanic white population has grown by 1 percent, compared with 26 percent among populations of color. So, who’s telling their stories?”

The International Institute of Minnesota, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant communities, estimates there are as many as 150,000 Somalis living in Minnesota—80 percent of them in Minneapolis. (Ibrahim was born in Somalia and moved to Minnesota in 2005, part of a wave of immigration that began in the early 1990s when faith-based organizations and refugee resettlement groups began sponsoring Somalis fleeing civil war.) Minnesota is still predominantly white, and a sometimes uneasy mix of urban gentrification, burgeoning communities of color, rural burgs, struggling Iron Range towns, and sprawling exurbs. But if anyone can put the Marge Gunderson Fargocliche to rest once and for all, it’s journalists like Mukhtar Ibrahim who are determined to tell new stories and spotlight emerging voices in communities of color.

Perhaps as important as the launch two years ago is a recent pivot, a hard-won insight crucial to defining what “local news” is. Like any number of media entrepreneurs, Ibrahim keeps a watchful eye on data, on audience, and on engagement. When a pioneering charter school that serves Somali families was set to close, the Sahan Journal’s education reporter, Becky Dernbach broke the news and began calling parents. For many of her sources, it was the first time they’d heard the news. Dernbach and Ibrahim realized they couldn’t just press publish and assume the story would automatically find an audience. Sahan Journal reporter Aala Abdullahi wrote a separate story about what happened next, when the Journal pivoted to use targeted social media and Somali television to reach parents. “We had to find a creative, culturally relevant, and digestible way to communicate the months-long reporting that Becky had so diligently put together,” Abdullahi wrote.

The Journal recognized that there was a language barrier—parents spoke Somali, Spanish, Oromo, or Amharic as a first language. And there was a higher level of engagement on Facebook and WhatsApp. That’s why the Journal partnered with Somali TV Minnesota, a Somali-language channel on Facebook Live that reaches a large Twin Cities audience and allows live questions from viewers. “Essentially,” Abdullahi wrote, “we realized that we needed to create a version of this story that came to life through video or audio, produce it in a more familiar language, and publish it on a platform where our audience already existed.” As of early June, the show, which aired May 27, had been viewed 9,000 times.

It was Sahan Journal’s first live event, and the staff hopes it won’t be the last. Other ideas in play include fliers summarizing the key points of the charter school story, which could be distributed to parents and concerned neighbors in the Somali community. The most important lesson? Abdullahi nails it: “We also recognize that one size does not fit all. That is to say, we expect that with every community we want to develop deeper relationships with, there will be a specific avenue or method that works best. And we intend to keep asking the most important and relevant audience-centric questions—Who do we want to reach? Who is left out? What is the best way to connect them with news?—in order to get there.”

By Dan Kennedy

Among the more intriguing business models for news organizations is the co-op. They’ve been slow to get started, but their time may finally be coming. For years I followed the Banyan Project’s efforts to launch a demonstration site in Haverhill, Massachusetts, which ended up falling short. The Mendocino Voice is transitioning from for-profit to a co-op that will be owned by employees and readers. And the Voice is not alone.

Last week I sat in on a webinar called “Cooperatives in a Changing Media Landscape,” part of the Next Gen Entrepreneurship online conference. Two people immersed in co-ops discussed their experience: Kevon Paynter, co-founder and executive director of a project called Bloc by Block News, which reports on news in Maryland and aggregates the work of other publishers; and Jasper Wang, the co-owner and vice president of revenue and operations at The Defector, a mostly sports site founded by former employees of Deadspin, which in its heyday was part of the Gawker network. The moderator was Olivia Henry, a graduate student at the University of California in Davis.

The two projects are very different. The Defector was born big, launching last year with 19 employees — 18 of them editors and writers — and 10,000 subscribers. It currently has 39,000 subscribers. According to Wang, everyone is being paid a salary. The lowest is $58,500, with the possibility of making more depending on how much revenue the site is generating. (It’s more complicated than that, but never mind.)

“We’ve been financially sustainable since pretty early on,” Wang said. The site is owned by the employees, he added, with everyone participating in the governance of the site.

For those of us who are concerned about the local news crisis, Bloc by Block is intriguing. Paynter said the spark for it came during the 2016 election. When he went home to New Jersey to vote, he said, he knew who he would cast his presidential ballot for — but he didn’t have a clue about many of the other offices that were also being contested.

“I had no idea who to vote for when it came down to the local issues,” he said. He added that when he started talking with people after the election, many told him they simply vote for one party, Google the candidates or “we kind of make a guess the night before.”

Bloc by Block is supported by nonprofit foundation money, including Maryland Humanities; Paynter sees covering the arts and culture as part of his local news mission. The project is developing a mobile app that will allow users to see news from multiple publishers. Noting that there are more than 130 newspapers in Maryland, Paynter said, “There’s a discoverability issue, and we want to solve for that.”

Unlike The Defector, Bloc by Block is what Paynter calls a “multi-stakeholder cooperative,” with ownership shared among readers and the publishers whose news is being aggregated. Readers themselves can cover local governmental and neighborhood meetings, he added.

“It’s really about civic engagement as well as news,” he said, explaining that he wants his audience to “not simply be passive consumers of information but active participants.”

By Dan Kennedy

The New Bedford Light, a nonprofit news project launched recently, could lay claim to being the most highly touted community journalism organization in quite some time. Today, The New York Times weighs in. Previously, The Boston Globe and CommonWealth Magazine ran profiles.

As the Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye notes, the Light’s model is to run one significant story a day in the hopes of filling the gap created by the implosion of The Standard-Times, a venerable New Bedford daily that has been ripped apart under the ownership of the Gannett chain.

“We cannot go down the route of the daily newspaper that tries to do all things for all people,” the editor, Barbara Roessner, told Seelye. “The challenge for us is to stay disciplined to do the deeper work and not be caught up in the daily news cycle.”

I’m not so sure about that. As I’ve written previously, what the city might need more than anything is daily accountability journalism. It can be done effectively with a small staff, as the New Haven Independent, to name one example, has been demonstrating for nearly 16 years.

Still, the Light is attractive and has published some significant stories since its debut. Leading the site right now is a story by Will Sennott on the city’s looming eviction crisis. Other recent stories include a look at the effects of rising real-estate prices and racial and ethnic patterns of where COVID-19 hit the New Bedford area the hardest.

The leadership of the Light is unusually high-powered. Roessner is a former managing editor of the Hartford Courant and former executive editor of the Hearst Connecticut Media Group. The publisher is Stephen Taylor, a former top executive of The Boston Globe as well as a member of the family that used to own the Globe. Walter Robinson of “Spotlight” fame is a board member.

It looks like the Light should go a long way toward changing New Bedford’s status as an undercovered community.

By Dan Kennedy

Just before Thanksgiving last year, Melissa Milios Davis was contacted by Jerry Healey, the co-owner — along with his wife, Ann Healey — of Colorado Community Media, which publishes 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs.

The Healeys were approaching retirement and looking to sell, and they were hoping to avoid turning over their life’s work to a corporate chain owner or a hedge fund. Milios Davis, vice president for strategic communications and informed communities at the Gates Family Foundation, serves on the executive committee of the Colorado Media Project, which has been seeking ways forward for local news since 2018.

That encounter, Milios Davis said at a recent webinar (you can watch it here; background information here), led to the sale last month of the Healeys’ newspapers to a new entity whose majority owner will be The Colorado Sun, a startup digital news operation that’s run as a public benefit corporation. That means the 24 papers, like the Sun, will not be organized to enrich its owners; any profits they earn will be rolled back into news coverage and other operations.

“These are still profit-making enterprises. It’s a business,” said Milios Davis, adding it would have been a “huge loss” if the papers had fallen into the wrong hands.

Also speaking at the webinar, organized by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, were Lillian Ruiz, co-founder and managing director of the National Trust for Local News, and Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of the Sun. The moderator was Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the university.

According a recent article about the deal by Corey Hutchins of Colorado College, the papers will be owned by the newly formed Colorado News Conservancy, which in turn is co-owned by the National Trust for Local News and the Sun. Hutchins reported that the 40 employees who worked for the Healeys, about half of them journalists, would keep their jobs.

The conservancy is currently seeking a publisher, Ruiz said at the webinar, and has invested a considerable amount of attention in the process. “We didn’t want to create just a replication of who have we had some handshakes with over a highball,” she said.

The Sun itself, which was founded after the meltdown of The Denver Post under the ownership of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, is continuing to grow, said Ryckman — from a staff of about 10 when I wrote about the Sun for the Nieman Journalism Lab last fall to 15 today, with more on the way. He described the chance to save the community newspapers as something that was too important to pass up.