Two Recent Interviews With Publisher About New Directions for Our Media Platforms

On June 20, I was asked to join radio host Mike McIntee on an AM950 radio show to talk about independent journalism and the new direction of Minnesota Women’s Press into statewide discussions about stories and stories about discussions. Here is an excerpt of our conversation.

 

 

We’re going to talk about independent journalism, which is rarer and rarer these days. And what’s even rarer is when you can find it in print, independent journalism, but somebody who is out there on the front lines of this still every day is my old pal — I have to do this closure, former roommate from college, Mikki Morrissette — who owns and edits the women’s Minnesota Women’s Press. I want to start with what you’re doing and what you’re finding out.

Minnesota Women’s Press has been around for 40 years. We are the longest continuously run feminist publication in the country. But I am now taking things in a different sort of direction so that we can do deeper dives into some of the core issues, which involve housing, gender-based violence, mental health, immigrant stories, and ecofeminism.

This morning, I was on a call with seven different housing experts around the the state, which will lead to a full packed issue about housing in the future. The conversation ranged from everything about the need in Minnesota for more supportive housing, which is especially helpful for people who are recovering from substance use and really need that Housing First option, so that they’re in a place that has residential care and and don’t kick you out if you’ve had a lapse. It’s also very needed for people who are coming out of abusive relationships; it’s very hard for people to leave spaces when they have no place to go. Most of our communities around the state do not have affordable housing or rentals or vacancies, so a lot of the was about that.

It also included an affordable housing developer, an emerging developer, who comes from North Minneapolis. It took him two and a half years to go through all the regulations involved in trying to take an old single-family home and convert it into a new space. So, it was a deep conversation with a lot of people. We’re going to use those not only to tell the story from these interviews, but then create discussion guides and go around the state. We’re starting that next week, on different topics.

We will connect around the state, and have people sit in their living rooms and coffee shops with others and talk about what they learned from the article. Some of them will give us reports of what they’ve discussed and learned — things they might want to solve in their own community. Those become stories. And then we keep the cycle going on these main topics, because they are affecting all of the communities around Minnesota.

So, that’s where we’re going to focus. Part of what we’ll be doing is asking people to talk about what can they do in their own community, to make zoning rules a little different, to make Housing First a reality as opposed to lip service. We were in Winona a few months ago for a story that went online in May. They have amazing advocates who serve, for example, people who need mental health services but don’t have public transportation into the downtown clinic.  They are helping to find private landlords that will allow people to live closer to the town, to the main area, to the clinic, so that they can continue to get residential treatment. That’s a very innovative idea. They’re working really hard to make that happen with people in the community.

Somebody else that I talked to today on the call was Marty Maltby of Peace House, which offers lunch, with a group of  volunteers, to unhoused people in Minneapolis. One of the things he said that’s lacking is that we tend to try to find isolated apartments for people who are unhoused to go to, but he said what they want is a sense of community. It is lonely and difficult to be in your own place — he said we need more solutions around community-based housing where people can get the treatment that they need, but also not feel like they’re on their own.

There are different needs. It’s not a cookie-cutter solution for everybody. That’s part of what these discussions will be, being able to build more education and awareness about what those community needs are.

I would say the political weather has gotten more tumultuous. We have everything that’s being defunded. I assume that this is something that is making it a lot harder.

The conversations I’ve had with advocates in the gender-based violence area have indicated they spend so much time trying to get funding, especially with funds drying up, and with new regulations coming out that you can’t serve immigrants and others. It’s hard for people to know what they can and cannot do. Funding definitely is drying up from government sources, and so they spend so much time trying to get funding for the programs they need for direct services. They’re not able to do the things they want to be doing around prevention and the support groups they offer for both perpetrators and survivors.

One of the women on the housing call today was from Duluth. She said they were able to produce quite a few homes a couple years ago, and now they’re afraid they’re not going to be able to keep replicating that — there’s still such a big gaping need, just to serve workforce. Some areas around Minnesota have businesses that can’t find housing for their employees, and so communities need to figure out solutions.

We did a story recently around childcare. People move to communities that don’t have any childcare openings. How are they going to work? Hormel is one that has created a new solution for it. We talked to others around the state who, as a community and as a city are figuring out how to solve for these things, because these are the things that affect people at a very grassroots level. When you can’t rely on federal funding and state funding, it is get going to be tighter.

How is our community going to be able to deal with some of the health care needs? We’ll be doing an explainer soon about Medicaid. Most people don’t recognize how pervasive Medicaid is in the health care that people get. So if that does dry up more, there’s going to be far more issues for people. It’s not just for older people, or people with disabilities, or people who have mental health issues. It’s for anybody, for example, especially in rural communities, who are relying on clinics to pick up the the gap in funding for care.

I just saw some recent poll numbers, and people are becoming more aware of how much that impacts things. Medicaid is a program that we really need to have and protect. Where you see most of the things in America divided, 50/50, this is overwhelming. A majority of folks are saying this is a program we need. Yet we’re hearing that it could go away or that it could be cut. That seems to make no sense.

I want to take a moment to talk about another topic that’s super serious: independent journalism. These days there are is less  journalism. You don’t know what to trust. So much stuff might be coming from Russian bots. You really need reliable sources, and you need stuff that people actually reported, checked on and wrote, and it’s even better if you can pick it up and read it in your hands. And that’s what the Minnesota Women’s Press is. I just want to give you a moment here to talk about funding. Is it getting better or worse?

It has been difficult, especially with the pandemic, as well as everything else happening in journalism, to maintain the print space we are in. We’ve cut our distro sites from 600 down to about 400. We’ve cut our print runs from 40 pages to generally 24. And we’re going to move to print every other month instead of every month, partly to reduce some of the expenses, but also just so we can do deeper dives. We have a small team, and we’ve been expanding our revenue streams to keep afloat, but we don’t  have a lot of time to do all of that, so that’s why I’m switching up our production schedule.

I won’t mention how many decades ago we were starting out, when print was the thing, radio was your space. I was at the Minnesota Daily newspaper for more of my time in college. It’s not the same world anymore. It is a very different landscape because of the advent of the Internet, which siphons away advertising options. Often what is promoted in social media is not fact checked. Journalists jobs are disappearing. Communities are losing their community newspapers. That allows misinformation to be spread. So, yes, independent journalism is in trouble, but I have gone to several different gatherings with independent journalists around the country who are working really hard to try to figure out how to tell the stories.

The thing I love is that at Minnesota Women’s Press, we’re focused on the grassroots level. We’re not covering the day-to-day politics or crime stories or sports. We’re able to hone in on the storytelling of people at a grassroots level, the advocates and the people with lived experiences. That’s how we’ve been able to fine-tune what we do. I work with over 100 different writers in a year to tell their personal stories. But yes, it’s really tricky. We’re relying on a new membership model to try to help us keep going.

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Related Story

Publisher Mikki Morrissette talked with Mike McIntee and Ben Toff about the state of journalism in today’s democracy (click link for video)