🚀Community voices | Meet KZYS, Project Optimist’s partner in the Central Minnesota News Collaborative
Ten-plus years ago the St. Cloud Somali Community Radio began broadcasting local news to thousands of Somali speakers in central Minnesota. This month Project Optimist and KZYS are launching the new Central Minnesota News Collaborative, designed to strengthen local news through partnerships.
ST. CLOUD – Collaboration is key to the future of news. In fact, it’s key to the present.
News organizations are banding together to accomplish what they can’t alone – big stories that matter to multiple audiences.
Project Optimist and St. Cloud Somali Community Radio are proud to do just that under a new joint effort called the Central Minnesota News Collaborative. We announced the partnership a few weeks ago when we shared about receiving a Press Forward Minnesota grant of $40,000 for that work. Now we want to tell you what to expect from our collaboration.
“I think information is very important, like food,” said Ahmed Abdi, station manager at St. Cloud Somali Community Radio and executive director of its parent nonprofit organization, Hayaan Inc. “If you don’t have good information, you cannot make a good decision.”
Abdi said this at a panel on community news at the Minnesota Council on Foundations conference in mid-February. He came to St. Cloud in 2002 from Marshall, Minn., and worked as a Somali-language interpreter and translator. He started a news website and worked for a few years converting St. Cloud Times content into Somali-language videos for the local community. We worked at the paper at the same time for a few years.
The St. Cloud area is home to more than 8,400 people with Somali heritage. The radio station provides cultural and news content directly to that community. With so much misinformation, fact-checked and locally-produced news is an important public service.
St. Cloud Somali Radio launched as a web stream in 2013 with a state grant and space shared with KVSC, the student-run, independent radio station at St. Cloud State University.
“We are proud of our partnership here,” said Jim Gray, director of operations at KVSC.
Ten years ago St. Cloud Somali Radio took on the license to a low-power FM and broadcasts at 105.1 within a 7-mile radius in St. Cloud. The license is held by the nonprofit Hayaan Inc., which is responsible for its funding and programing.
St. Cloud Somali Community Radio content also airs on multiple social media channels. It covers local news – including health care, elections, and sports – and integrates national and cultural programs.
“One year ago, (Nora and I) sat together, and I said: ‘The news in our (Somali) community, it’s not getting to the other community. And what the main newspapers or radio are talking about, it’s not getting to the immigrant community,’” Abdi recalled.
Project Optimist can help St. Cloud Somali Community Radio report in-depth stories and integrate solutions journalism – rigorous, evidence-based reporting on responses to problems. And St. Cloud Somali Community Radio can bring up stories that need reporting and sources to bring those stories to life. By working together we can produce enlightening journalism that resonates with a Somali audience and a regional audience served by Project Optimist.
Here’s what we plan to accomplish in this first year of the Central Minnesota News Collaborative:
- A solutions journalism training for student and community reporters that’s open to the public but geared toward English-speaking residents of Somali heritage.
- Improvements to the St. Cloud Somali Community Radio website.
- Four co-reported stories about solutions and issues central to the Somali community in the St. Cloud area. Published in English and Somali, on the radio and online, for Project Optimist’s audience and the KZYS audience.
- Four additional stories co-published.
Abdi hears from his audience that they want more local programs – a sports show, coverage in the Somali language, and some English coverage for younger listeners. And he knows there’s a need for accurate information to counter misinformation rampant online about vaccines and immigration enforcement, for example.
We hope the partnership will help both organizations grow and become the core of a long-term collaboration that brings in other news outlets for even more impact.
Support our project with a donation or sponsorship!
This is just the beginning of the Central Minnesota News Collaborative.
This column was edited by Becca Most.