Welcome to the December edition of the Minnesota Journalism Center newsletter. We’re aiming for something for everyone as a mini-present for the holidays.

This month, we’re highlighting:

• An AI solutions event at MNA followed by a Hackathon at the U.
• Links to random interesting things, including tips for using Bluesky, NICAR heads to Minneapolis, plus new grants and fellowships.
• The expansion of Report for Minnesota this spring to include legislative coverage.
• Ongoing research on how news organizations can better reach, engage, and build trust with young adults.

Scroll down (or click the link at the bottom if you can’t get to all the good parts) to read all about it.

– Ben Toff, director, bjtoff@umn.edu; Gayle (G.G.) Golden, associate director of student educational initiatives, ggolden@umn.edu; Regina McCombs, associate director of outreach and training, rmccombs@umn.edu; and Meg Martin, associate director, martinme@umn.edu.

AI + Local News Hackathon, two events, Jan. 30 - Feb. 1

We’re teaming up with Hacks/Hackers to host two related events for newsrooms and journalists interested in developing AI tools. Join us on Thursday, Jan. 30, during the Minnesota Newspaper Association conference for a session focused on idea development, along with a discussion on the issues of ethics and audience trust. Journalists from any type of news organization are encouraged to attend. Then Friday and Saturday, Jan. 31-Feb. 1, we'll gather journalists, developers, community members and students at the Hubbard School on the University of Minnesota campus to work in teams and move some of those big ideas closer to reality. Registration begins in early January.  

This is the MJC’s first monthly event for 2025, designed (in part) to strengthen public and non-profit news organizations. Thanks to a grant from the McKnight Foundation, the MJC will host in-person and virtual events for both education and networking. Stay tuned to this newsletter for upcoming events.  

You can also find the MJC at: MinnPost Social: Rebuilding Local News in Greater Minnesota Dec. 16 (virtual) and at the Institute for Independent Journalism’s 2025 Freelance Conference Feb. 27-28 (virtual).

Find more training, events and ways to connect with your fellow Minnesota journalists on the MJC website. Subscribe to the training calendar or newsroom events calendar -- or email us (martinme@umn.edu) to share events you'd like added to the calendar or featured in this newsletter. 

– Meg

The NICAR conference will be held in Minneapolis March 6-9, 2025. Lots of data journalism training at all skill levels, with discounts for freelance, early career and student journalists. Not sure if it’s for you? Here’s an interesting take from a “NICAR newbie." 

CatchLight and Prism Photo Workshop are collaborating to develop a better understanding of the current state of local visual journalism in U.S. media with their Local Visual Journalism 2024-2025 Survey, open until January 10. It’s long, but there are prizes! 

Grant and fellowship opportunities

A new round of grant applications are open from Press Forward, this time for infrastructure improvements. The funding coalition announced its next Open Call for Infrastructure grants, with applications due January 15. These investments will support ideas that can help make newsrooms more resilient and sustainable by addressing one of four key areas: audience, operations, people or revenue. All applications must be submitted by nonprofit organizations or by a fiscal sponsor of a group of for-profit organizations.

Applications are due Feb. 1 for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program’s new fellowship opportunity focused specifically on local news in the Great Lakes region. The fellowship will let journalists pursue their “most ambitious idea,” spending an academic year at the University of Michigan as part of an international cohort. Each fellow brings a project that they’d like to develop over the course of their time there – often focused on addressing an issue they’ve encountered within their own work; deepening their expertise in a specific area of coverage; or setting themselves up for a career pivot within journalism. There is a webinar for prospective applicants in January. 

The IWMF has grants for Indigenous journalists to cover missing and murdered Native women. 

Applications for the Reynolds Journalism Institute Women in Journalism Workshop (April 10-12 in Columbia, Mo.) are open through Dec. 27, 2024. 

Twitter who?

Mike Reilley at Journalist’s Toolbox AI has resources, links, and add-on tools, including Deck Blue, a Tweetdeck equivalent for Bluesky (I can’t tell you how happy this makes me).

Plus, here’s Bluesky’s FAQ for journalists.  

ONA is hosting a talk with Bluesky’s Emily Liu on Dec. 18, and it’s also a chance to talk about news organizations’ successes and challenges on the platform.  

One of many fun features in Bluesky are the starter packs – lists of people that users create. So I began a Minnesota Journalists (# 1) starter pack. Journalists only, no organizations. It’s heavy on the Twin Cities (see following), and Duluth (because the News Tribune has a staff starter pack!). Send me your Bluesky user name and I will happily add you. A few others of interest: MSP News Outlets + Journos, Journalism studies, Local US journalists, Photojournalists, Journalism (lots of the big outlets, including international ones), Journalism Thinkers, Data + Investigative journos and Independent, worker-owned, reader-supported journalism. If you have other starter packs we should share, send them my way! 

You can find all of us there, too: Ben, G.G., Meg and Regina.

FOIA and First Amendment issues

Nieman Lab takes a look at what a second Trump term might mean for FOIA. 

The Columbia Journalism Review writes about a new(ish) DOJ report that suggests that journalists have a First Amendment right to remain at a scene even after members of the public have been dispersed.

More on news deserts

According to a recent State of the Local News Report from Medill, news deserts have increased, with 127 newspapers closing in the past 12 months and more than half of U.S. counties having none or one news source. Their “watch list” of potential news desert counties rose 22% from last year. But there was a net increase of 81 digital-only local news outlets, with one-third of them being less than five years old. The report also looked at digital news networks such as TAPinto and States Newsrooms, the rise of philanthropic giving and the impact of policy initiatives. (via Knight)

Local connections

Duluth area journalists, UMD is looking for adjunct faculty. Here's more info.

In case you missed it, Minnesota Star Tribune editor Suki Dardarian announced her retirement. 

Congrats to Woodbury News Net for their shout-out from the Tiny News Collective for hitting some growth milestones!

Just for fun

Twin Cities Public Television’s Broadcast Wars documentary series. Whether or not you were around for TV news in the Twin Cities in the 70s and 80s, it’s fascinating viewing.

Please send us your local industry news and updates to share with everyone.

– Regina

Report for Minnesota expands to the Minnesota Legislature.

The Hubbard School will fund two internships this spring in partnership with Forum Communications for students to cover the 2025 legislative session. The 12-week internships, which expand the Report for Minnesota program, will add to Forum’s legislative coverage for Greater Minnesota communities through student stories that focus on particularly remote areas of the state. We are so grateful to Forum for this opportunity. 

The MJC is also exploring how to create customized legislative coverage for small outstate news outlets, including weeklies. Could your news outlet use more stories from the Legislature angled for your community’s needs? If you think you want to participate in this potential pilot, let’s talk. Email me at ggolden@umn.edu. 

– G.G.

MJC Director Benjamin Toff presented some preliminary results from a new research study at a post-election academic conference convened by the Wesleyan Media Project in Connecticut last week. The study, a randomized field experiment designed to examine the impact of following news content on Instagram during the 2024 election (specifically MPR News’ Reverb content), is part of a larger project seeking to understand how news organizations can better reach, engage, and build trust with young adults on platforms like Instagram as well as TikTok. 

Meanwhile, postdoctoral fellow Meagan Doll and graduate student Cydney Grannan are also finalizing data collection planning for studies we are conducting in collaboration with the Texas Tribune, Chicago Sun Times, and the Alliance for Trust in Media examining how participants in news organization engagement efforts through in-person events and texting initiatives think about their involvement in these activities. 

The team looks forward to writing up and sharing findings from both of these studies more broadly in the new year. 

Finally, the MJC research team has also been hard at work on next steps in its collaboration with Trusting News around testing how audiences perceive news organizations’ labeling and disclosure around their use of generative AI. Postdoc Suhwoo Ahn has been analyzing results from some preliminary data collected earlier this fall, and we are in the final stages of designing a new experiment we plan to field in January in time to share results at the upcoming Hackathon!

– Ben

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