Over the past month, I've struggled to convert my overwhelm into mere whelm, starting and stopping instead of finishing and sending. I've been chewing on the below essay since January, struggling to structure observations into a more resonant and coherent form. But eventually, the work has to be finished, and I'm working to segue these observations on the past three months in Minnesota back into this newsletter's normal beat: how to use the tools we have now to build more sustainable digital information ecosystems.

Earlier this month, I chatted with WTF is SEO? about how journalism can lean into brand and audience research to attract higher quality audiences. The essay below provides a deeper explanation of how news organizations can conquer platform fatigue by focusing on brand and collective support. Thanks to Jessie and Shelby for the great conversation, and if you're not already subscribed, WTF is SEO? provides phenomenal advice for standing out among the algorithms.

Programming note: For the forseeable future, this newsletter will be an occasional weekend project, since my weeks are filled with immensely satisfying client work, and a Thursday send is challenging to assemble. Here's hoping the following gives you something to chew on at the beginning of the week.

How Minnesota media models journalism in service of a community

In a wildly unprecedented turn of events, last weekend I agreed with the New York Times' famously neoliberal columnist Thomas Friedman. His column on Minnesota's neighbor-focused resistance to ICE read as empathetic and accurate, supportive of his home state's response to the shocking violence of deportations in our community. Instead of branding us as wild left-wing radicals, he draws the same conclusion in protecting neighbors that I do: what happened in Minneapolis this winter was a pro-democratic model worth closer inspection.

I've spent much of the past month gathering and reflecting on my observations of what happened here. For much of January and February what I read and observed made me feel feral, like Adriana La Cerva, scrambling powerless in the bullseye. The U.S. is not even halfway through the woods of the second Trump administration. Our president started a war on a whim, and our bombs are destroying Iran with no end in sight. ICE continues its abduction of immigrants and responds to the neighbors who dare to protect them with additional violence (Solidarity to Burlington, VT and other active resistance movements). We feel powerless while consuming a barrage of bad news, and for weeks on end, the despair hasn't fully relented.

But, like Friedman (ick! I can't believe me, either), I believe that my neighbors gave us a glimpse of a better future. The cooperative, decentralized resistance to federal violence ultimately unified our state of free-thinking winter-loving weirdos. Friedman believes the neighborliness comes from our willingness to dig each other out in the snow, but my theory is more institutional: the Minnesota news media market is committed to presenting objective truth in service of its community. Faced with relentless lies from both the administration and absurd disinformation from amateur influencers, Minnesota media and audiences embraced what I consider "journalism classic (tm)" bolstered with unprecedented citizen documentation.

I moved to Minnesota because of its established, diverse media ecosystem, which in my nineteen years here has stuck to its roots in the age of digital reinvention. In covering Operation Metro Surge and the response, journalists at both legacy and digital-native outlets kept Minnesota audiences grounded in truth. Politics never replaced fact; framing never overtook the grim reality we faced.

We're all justified in fretting about the future of media, with big tech-level consolidation in legacy media and the twin threats of poor algorithms and generative AI. But I saw the clearest proof of a sustainable, meaningful, even encouraging (?!?) future for news and media over the past few months. As we steel ourselves to make it to 2028 without falling apart (and we can? We can), I hope we can start creating conditions for more media ecosystems like the Twin Cities. Here's what worked:

Minnesota news outlets reported observed facts, not chatter

Since November 2025, when scrutiny heightened on Minnesota amid increasingly hyperbolic accusations of "fraud", Minnesota local media outlets insisted on digging into the facts behind the administration's narrative. When high school prankster-turned-conservative influencer Nick Shirley showed up at the tail end of December to ambush daycare centers in a video amplified by J.D. Vance, both the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio published fact-checks. And throughout the ICE and CBP invasions of Operation Metro Surge, established news organizations (even the softies in tv news!) committed to verifying every piece of information they published.

Anyone who was in a neighborhood observer Signal chat or who saw the influencer videos knows: misinformation and disinformation added to the stress of the violence we saw on our streets and in our feeds. People of all political affiliations act like people, especially when in Resistance Mode, and we all get the truth mixed up with emotion. Facts and gossip become indistinguishable without authoritative sources. Our local media ecosystem provided a daily account of what actually happened, keeping us rooted in the real world amid the crush of fear. I lost so much faith in humanity over the past few months, but Minnesota media kept me sane.

Selected examples:

The audience is our neighborhood

It feels weird to commend journalists for reporting the events they observe—isn't that what journalism is?—but the brand of "journalism" has lost trust because many outlets have moved away from rooting news stories in real-world observations. If what audiences observe in our everyday lives doesn't match up to what we read from news outlets, we lose trust. The reader's reality doesn't vibe with the published story.

At some point in the past decade, many national news outlets began valuing digital optics over independence and holding power to account, which alienates the information-seeking audiences who grew up with an understanding of the fourth estate and the First Amendment. Reporters either lean too heavily on trying to represent views from the two major political parties, or relentlessly repeat social media chatter, instead conversing in-person with humans. As a relatively moderate internet user and former researcher of "new media," the shift to placate and augment digital conversation has rendered a narrative that is often vastly different from my experienced reality, which creates immense dissonance and frustration (more on this next week). During Operation Metro Surge, Minnesota news outlets rigorously reported and edited stories for real-world validity. In my opinion, our media ecosystem established a shared reality for all Minnesotans, regardless of political affiliation.

Our local media outlets know that their neighbors are their audience. The empathy and collective support for their distressed peers was evident in their choice of stories and of words. Instead of relentlessly repeating the administration's narrative that our city was overrun by immigrant criminals—as national news and social media did—our local media treated its audience like their neighbors. Maybe it's good business, since news organizations know that their audience is more likely to donate and subscribe when the audience feels heard and represented. But the stories I read felt like reporters saw themselves as part of our community, as our peers and not an audience to be captured.

Selected examples:

Deep experience with social media dynamics, good and bad

Minnesota's local media ecosystem has always extended into digital communities. Internet forums have fueled cultural engagement for years (ask a Gen X music fan about the Modern Radio message board). We champion our influencers as equals to legacy giants (remember when Nora McInerny wiped the floor with GK?). And our early experiments in "new media" have lasted longer than Gawker, Buzzfeed, and Vice: late-aughts start-ups MinnPost and Bring Me the News were major players in reporting on Operation Metro Surge.

We also understand the dark sides of online culture and the media business. Many Minnesotans would like to forget Little Green Footballs' role in pulling Dan Rather from CBS. The Star Tribune's execution of the City Pages digital archive all but eliminated any online record of our storied alt-weekly's history. And almost all of our major media outlets struggle with website and app information design, especially in their archives (admittedly a personal gripe).

But the intense tension of previous media eras has smoothed out in the Twin Cities. In the deluge of information over the past three months, local outlets linked to each other. Unicorn Riot's coverage of the unrest following George Floyd's murder positioned it as an ideal streamer to counter the Nick Shirleys and other right-wingers. The Sahan Journal has been an established voice for immigrant communities and skillfully served immigrant audiences most affected by the violence. The Minnesota Reformer—on top of fraud before it was a Republican talking point—reminds us that narratives around crime are usually more nuanced than political talking points allow. And Racket keeps the City Pages spirit alive with its fantastic round-ups and vintage comments section (tacomike > Will Stancil).

Independent influencer-journalists also played a key role in the resistance, a welcome counter to the administration's saturation of social media. Georgia Fort, probably the most high-profile solo journalist/creator from Minnesota, distributed news of the Minnesota resistance to a broader social media audience. Along with former CNN reporter Don Lemon, Fort was arrested and charged with two felonies on January 30 for covering a protest at a local church on January 18. She maintains (and I agree) that the arrest is a violation of her First Amendment rights as a journalist. Fort and Lemon are solo operators, and without the backing of a major media company, they face a long and expensive legal battle with the potential to impact the First Amendment rights of independent creators of all political affiliations.

Selected examples:

Extended documentation of a movement, not a moment

Fort was hardly alone in her commitment to document the invasion of Minnesota. On January 14, following the killing of Renee Good and its aftermath, Governor Tim Walz implored Minnesota to use our pocket brains for their best possible purpose: to show the world what we were seeing, even when we couldn't believe our own eyes.

The most surreal part of January was watching the ICE and CBP brutality unfold on social media—not on the algorithmic For You feeds (I avoid those), but in my friends' shared Instagram stories. When women who normally share cat photos started posting videos of their terrorized friends and abducted neighbors, the scale of the invasion became unavoidable. Public documentation from citizens who aren't normally overtly political, while people were on weekend errands, while they were escorting their kids to school, captured the scope of violence and outrage. When you're living in the center of the storm, it's easy to tell these videos were not AI-generated: I recognized the shopping centers and neighborhoods in the footage. I saw real people, terrorized in real places, the kinds of horrors that surface like flashbulb memories on every drive through town.

The social media industry has many problems, amplifying and monetizing hyperbole and outrage, but the widespread documentation efforts in Minnesota reminded me why I believed in the technology in the first place. More than once I thought of the optimistic tomes I read in graduate school—The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky—that claimed mass access to digital media would ultimately increase civic participation in addressing challenging problems head-on. When placed in the context of civic accountability rather than the attention-seeking swamp of influencer culture, digital documentation became a defense system, proof that what happened in Minnesota wouldn't be forgotten in the next media cycle, or smoothed over by folks who "see both sides."

Selected examples:

How journalism stays alive: Emergent media strategy and collective respect

It's hard to feel hopeful about the future of media as an ecology of information, but Minnesota's journalism and civic culture prevent me from obliging the bleakness. Our coverage and documentation demonstrated how media organizations and audiences could informally collaborate to illuminate what we lived through. Instead of treating audiences as a business asset and other brands as competitors, our media organizations recognized that democracy is a collective commitment and that the manufacture of consent doesn't work when people know what we saw. 

National media and independent culture creators alike treat media coverage as a product for consumption, like a plot point rather than a nuanced, ongoing experience. Ongoing violence becomes reduced to "trauma" or "Minneapolis," lazy shorthand that distracts from the complexity of our collective human agency. Minnesota's journalism in 2026 demonstrated that we, as adult citizens of the world, have the power to understand our circumstances and effect change, even in the shadow of authoritarianism. An informed public participates not as audience members who passively consume content, but as proactive advocates for what's right when our government demands that we ignore our education and judgment.

What worked in Minnesota can scale to other markets, as long as media companies remember what made the 20th century press so powerful in the first place: 

  • Treat audiences as adult peers, not passive eyeballs. Assume audiences are smarter than individual reporters, writers, and editors, who can frame stories but do not own facts.
  • Trying to "capture" an audience or create a rabid fandom from fickle social media users isn't a play for long-term success. For-profit media companies need to consider what is working brilliantly to keep nonprofit media alive: regular reminders of why audiences should choose journalism over entertainment, as well as a focus on humans who want to opt-in. (And tote bags are never a bad idea.)
  • When it comes to journalism in a world of endless media choice, a brand that focuses on established criteria for newsworthiness cultivates frequent readers. Constantly pivoting to meet perceived trends or to pander to loud internet voices alienates less fickle normie lurkers who value consistency and accuracy. Most people do not build their lives around what's on Twitter/X. Most people read or watch the news in traditional "story" formats so they can live their lives as informed members of the public.
  • In a time of crisis, media brands need to work together to amplify each other's strengths. Contemporary audiences do not get news from a single source, but from multiple stories that complement each other. Consistently linking and supporting high-quality journalism from other media brands improves trust and generally leads to more subscribers across the board.
  • Everyone has the tools to participate in media when they are called upon or feel the need, and it's not something we should take for granted. Social media ecosystems have many layers and use cases beyond the influencers who ride algorithms to virality. Not everyone with an opinion is a troll or a naysayer, and conversational approaches to media build long-run loyalty. Viewing audiences as collective participants in social networks beats complaining about "the algorithm" and big tech's failures. "Audience engagement" can be understood as a collective documentation of reality, rather than as short-hand for attention hacking. (And, in my opinion, we now have the tools to build smarter algorithms that override the stereotyping and virality-chasing social networks of the past 15 years.)

The Minnesota ecosystem is a model for the future of American media. We're part of a collective, of institution and audience, a network of everybody, protecting what we value, steadfast in protecting what we know to be true, refusing the trend of silent compliance. 

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written by Deborah Carver, an independent content strategy consultant, and edited (but never written) with help from Claude.

Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system

Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd

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