Leaders and community members in St. Cloud talk with one another about what makes their community unique during one of six stops on the Star Tribune Minnesota Matters tour. (Kyndell Harkness/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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No matter where you stand, the news hasn’t been very encouraging lately. If you hitched your outlook to the national headlines, you might find it hard to be optimistic about America. Talk of division is everywhere. According to recent polling, nearly half of Americans think the U.S. could see another civil war in their lifetimes.

The national media often drives this feeling of division even deeper. When you see the story lines of left vs. right, good vs. evil and authoritarianism vs. liberal wokeism, is it any wonder that America feels unmoored?

Amid all of this, where can we find hope?

I found some answers to that question on a recent tour across Minnesota. My colleagues and I have been traveling the state to learn how our moves to expand our coverage can have the biggest impact. On the heels of hiring new reporters in several towns outside the Twin Cities, we’ve brought together local leaders and citizens in lively conversations about their communities and our work.

The answers I’ve found haven’t been magical, and I’m not here to offer a rose-colored view of America’s future. But what I have discovered is that when you go local, things look a lot different.

When you go local, you see a real sense of pride in American communities. In Mankato, we sat down with two national championship basketball coaches from Minnesota State University, Mankato who told us they fell in love with the college town when they moved there and have turned down offers at Division I programs because this felt like home.

In Brainerd, Mayor Dave Badeaux zips around town talking to constituents on his skateboard and has his personal cellphone listed on the city’s website. “It’s just part of the job,” he says. In fact, the mayor is such a big fan of his hometown that he recently delivered a 113-slide presentation at the local library on the significance of Brainerd’s water tower. Talk about local pride!

In Rochester, community leaders told us they’re proud of far more than just the Mayo Clinic. Finding a medium-sized community where they can plant some roots and have lots of things to do with their families makes the city feel like home. We heard the same thing in Moorhead and Duluth.

Another thing you find when you go local is that people everywhere want a common set of facts about their communities. Understanding the truth only strengthens our ability to discuss and debate what to do about it. That shared interest is a powerful thing.

Of course, the challenge is that local journalism is struggling everywhere. Over the past decade, a third of all Minnesota newspapers have vanished and two-thirds of journalists have left the profession. Just this year we’ve seen a number of community papers close down in the face of economic pressures.

On our tour, the effect was clear. In St. Cloud, local leaders are regularly beating back fake news stories that go viral online. When a police officer was shot in the hand a few years ago, a false rumor spread that he’d shot a Black man, leading to property damage and arrests at the local police station before the mayor could call a news conference to set the record straight.

In Brainerd, our neighbors told us the city gets pigeonholed for anything bad that happens in the Lakes Region. They called it the “Brainerd Man” problem, a nod to the beginning of any headline that shares a negative story about the actions of a single person that then reflects poorly on the rest of the community.

When larger media outlets come to cities in greater Minnesota to cover just one story, rarely do they accurately reflect the character of a community. People in Moorhead get pegged as being part of Fargo. People in Rochester feel like they’re only known for Mayo. And when the New York Times came to do a story about racial tensions St. Cloud, leaders had to treat it as an “information emergency” and try to counter the message.

The fact that every community I’ve visited has had a clear desire for objective, fact-based reporting gives me hope that people want to choose unity over division. That we want to understand what’s happening in our communities rather than simply shout at one another, armed with our own sets of facts.

Finally, when you go local, you find a real problem-solving mentality in our state. A belief that this is a place where we can tackle our challenges together. Whether it’s affordable housing, child care, attracting talent or fixing our potholes, I heard time and again that local communities thrive in our state when they work together.

Belief that your neighbors will be there when you need them is what’s kept American communities together since the beginning. As St. Louis County Commissioner Annie Harala told us about her hometown, “Duluth is the kind of place where you meet just as many people when they’re shoveling your car out of a snowbank as you do on a sunny day in the park.”

My colleagues and I at the Star Tribune left each of these conversations not only with hope but with a clear sense of our role in Minnesota’s future.

First, we need to give Minnesotans a more holistic picture of what’s happening in communities across the state. We can’t swoop in just for floods and murders. We have to be consistently in a community to lift up not only the struggles but also the pride that is so prevalent when you go local.

Second, we need to redouble our efforts to expand objective, fact-based coverage of news and events across the state. That means not only more coverage in greater Minnesota but more partnerships that help community newspapers thrive. Whether sharing content or business strategies, we see partnership as key to the success of a Minnesota in which fact-based reporting powers community strength.

And last, we need to use our reporting to lift up local solutions to common problems we all face — so that we can learn from one another. If we can draw connections and themes across the state to help you understand your community better, then we’ve made the whole of our report greater than the sum of its parts.

These opportunities and more lie ahead for the Star Tribune. We believe we can be the heart and the voice of the North for all Minnesotans, committed to strengthening communities through the act of journalism.

In the next few weeks, you’re going to see some bigger changes to our report as we modernize our platform and sharpen our focus for Minnesota. If there was ever a moment when you deserved a strong statewide news organization, this is it. Watch this space and let us know what you think.

We hope you consider subscribing, not just to us but to any local news organization in your community. Because when you go local, America looks like a place where community wins over division.

That gives me hope.

Steve Grove is CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune.