Why We’re Investing in Deeper Stories
Apr 24, 2023
Budgets are in the news. Minnesota’s state budget will be front and center during the month of May in advance of the session deadline and our legislative reporters will keep you expertly briefed. President Biden’s proposed budget is under discussion by both the House and Senate. Household budgets are under pressure and Chris Farrell, Kai Ryssdal, and the whole Marketplace team offer us their ongoing insights to the ups and downs.
Our values at the core
Budgets serve as an expression of our values. This is my fourth cycle of budgeting as President of MPR. Each year we work hard to invest the resources we have with great care. We aim our focus on what matters most to you, our listeners, and to our ability to serve the state with news, music, information, and entertainment. We take this responsibility seriously.
When I took on this role in the spring of 2020, we were facing buyouts and layoffs. The coronavirus pandemic drove the pressure to cut back. The pandemic, and then the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, took center stage. Our journalists handled daily news while covering the protests, trials, and verdicts. Our music teams invited listeners to take a break from the news with interludes of beautiful songs and compositions—they offered us stress relief and built our sense of community.
Our newsroom did their very best to keep our community informed even as we operated as a very lean team. But the truth is we did not have enough journalists in the MPR Newsroom to cover daily news events and go deeper by sharing the array of perspectives we see as crucial to the coverage we’re known for—journalism that reveals the underlying issues that contextualize daily news.
Sustaining a pace
Looking back, the team did a remarkable job, but they were working at an unsustainable pace. That’s why we’ve been working to rebuild and expand our capacity to cover the most important issues facing our region. Since that first budget I oversaw, we’ve restored several local news positions, filling the roles with great talent and new voices. We’ve gone from 57 journalists in the MPR Newsroom last spring to more than 90 today, including a dozen journalists who are primarily focused on our national investigative and enterprise initiatives. We’ve restored the muscle we’d lost in recent years and we’re back above the waterline!
One high priority for the 2023-24 budget cycle will be reinvesting in regional reporting, and the kind of deeply reported enterprise journalism that helps our audiences better understand the complexities and nuances that quick-turn daily stories generally can’t convey.
It’s the kind of journalism I believe you’ve come to count on from MPR News. Stories that seek to add context and fill in gaps to really help us make better sense of the world around us.
Innovating with enterprise
What I especially appreciate about this kind of storytelling is it offers the remarkable people who report the news the opportunity to tell more impactful stories. We want each one of our exceptional reporters to have the capacity to get off the daily treadmill of news and do something important and challenging. Issues of race, class, age, or position within a community cannot be understood from one point on the dial or one perspective. We know that looking into the systems and infrastructure of our lives, such as deeper healthcare reporting or focused environmental reporting, offers us a new way of seeing important issues in multiple dimensions.
We’re keenly aware of the many time slots the 24-hour news cycle requires us to fill. We aim to give you stories that will engage you as listeners, give you new insights into the complex issues of the day and the decade, and help you make decisions about your life. Giving attention to enterprise journalism takes more time, more care, and because of that, it’s more expensive to produce.
Our social contract
I see enterprise journalism as a way to attend to what we owe one another, our social contract, if you will. Because of the diverse sources of generous funding we receive from members, foundations, underwriting, and government agencies—we’re making investments to expand our ability to cover the whole state in depth.
For example, our education reporter Elizabeth Shockman is working on a story that explores the ways students across the metro are addressing equity and inclusion.
And Dan Kraker and Melissa Olson recently released a story that details the University of Minnesota’s new report on their long history of mistreating the state’s Native people and their recommendations for moving forward.
Finally, Minnesota Now with Cathy Wurzer is an excellent example of how we're bringing enterprise journalism to the airwaves every weekday. Hear more about Minnesota Now from Cathy here.
Thank you for being part of our community and for believing in the power of MPR.
We are better for your support.
Duchesne Drew
President, Minnesota Public Radio
About Duchesne Drew
Duchesne Drew is Senior Vice President of American Public Media Group and President of Minnesota Public Radio. In this role, he leads the teams that produce MPR News, The Current, APM Reports and Marketplace. Additionally, he oversees YourClassical MPR as a part of Minnesota Public Radio.