At a moment of transition between managing editors and editors-in-chief, let’s take a look back at how Streets.mn got started, how we have evolved, and where we are headed in the future.
Links
- Earliest Streets.mn post that Ian could find
- Twin Cities Streets For People, the site that Tony Rossell was hosting before Streets.mn was formalized
- Greater Greater Washington
- Urban MSP forums
- Gleeman and the Geek, the Twins baseball podcast that inspired Bill
- An early podcast episode that Bill is proud of
- Matty Lang, videographer in the early days
- The Uptake
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was hosted, edited, and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to David Levinson, Bill Lindeke, Amy Gage, and Cirien Saadeh for coming on the show. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful, Uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. Community amenities, like our little publication, don’t just pop into existence by accident, and they don’t remain in existence without a lot of sustained effort. We’re currently at a point of transition with both the editor-in-chief and the managing editor positions changing hands, so this seemed like a perfect time to look back on the history of Streets.mn and discuss where we are headed in the future. First up, we’re going to hear from David Levinson and Bill Lindeke about the early years. FYI, I recorded the two of them separately, but I have spliced their answers together here.
[00:00:54] David: I’m David Levinson, I am currently a professor of civil engineering at the University of Sydney. At the time, I was a professor of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota. I got into urbanism and urbanist topics, and I guess I’d say urban planning. When I was a kid growing up in Columbia, Maryland, Columbia is a planned community, and so I was exposed to urban planning in elementary school. James Rouse, who was the guy who planned Columbia, but was most famous probably as a shopping mall developer and doing other things like that, lived in our neighborhood, came to our main elementary school, gave talks, we were exposed to a lot of things, and so I was interested in that very early on, and I was drawing street networks as a kid when other kids were outside.
[00:01:41] Ian: Playing in the street?
[00:01:42] David: Yes, playing in the street, but people did that back then. Later in high school, I became interested in computers, ultimately went to Georgia Tech, did a degree in civil engineering after going through various iterations, went to work in Montgomery County, Maryland as a transportation modeler, and then I went to Berkeley for my PhD, which was mostly in transportation economics and road pricing, and then moved out to Minnesota for the teaching job.
[00:02:09] Ian: All right, so talking about the beginnings of Streets.mn.
[00:02:13] David: So yeah, I mean, we were talking about it in 2011, and I think I sent out an email to all of the local transport and land use bloggers in the Twin Cities that I knew of, and then some other people were at it because I had none of everybody, and the idea was basically that we might be more effective having a group blog than a bunch of individual blogs. And by more effective, I just meant more readers because people would come to one place instead of 11 or 12 different places. And back then, of course, people tended to be either reading blogs by going to the website or following RSS feeds. And if we had something going like one post every day, as opposed to each of us having one post every week or every two weeks or every month or whatever, then there’d be some more regularity and people would be more likely to pay attention to it. And I mean, I think that that hypothesis, I think, was borne out pretty well. Yeah. And so, you know, our readership went way up in the first couple of years. I mean, we were on this exponential growth path, you know, whereas if it had continued, we would have overtaken the Star Tribune and readership didn’t continue, but had it continued, we would have.
[00:03:33] Ian: Well, it is kind of easier to have exponential growth right at the beginning of something, you know.
[00:03:39] David: Of course, I mean, we all knew that. But, you know, it was fun to plot it out. And, you know, we got basically once we agreed, we set up a formal organization, a board of directors, everyone who was a writer was the board and the board was the writers initially. So there weren’t like non writers on the board.
[00:04:02] Ian: Was that always, was that always like a 501c3?
[00:04:06] David: I think it was pretty much, I mean, it took a few months to get it in place. So I think initially we were just acting without it, but that was more or less the intention that there’d be some, you know, just to have a little bit of insurance against somebody went crazy. And, you know, we don’t want to be personally liable for something that somebody else might say type of thing.
[00:04:26] Bill: My name is Bill Lindeke. I am one of the founding members of Streets.mn. There was about 10 people at the first meeting. I also spent a lot of time working on the website and with the nonprofit board over the years, about 10 more years doing that. So before that, though, I had kind of gotten interested in urbanism through moving back from New York City where I lived after college for a little while. And then coming back to St. Paul where I grew up and realizing how unwalkable everything was. And I started blogging. It’s going to be 20 years in October when I started this blog called Twin City Sidewalks. It’s sort of a hobby to write about cities. And initially my blog was sort of picking a different street that I thought was interesting and talking about how it was designed and maybe diving into a little bit of small businesses or history of it a little bit, you know, fast forward what five, six, seven years, people started realizing or noticing my work and I got invited to this first meeting for Streets.mn. There was a planning firm that that helped us called Community Design Group and they hosted the first website and stuff. It was actually called Twin City Streets for People. That was the initial-
[00:05:55] Ian: Really rolls off the tongue.
[00:05:57] Bill: Yeah, Streets.mn is a way better name. So anyway, there was 10 people in the room and David got everyone together. And I didn’t even raise my hand at the beginning to like be on the executive committee or anything. But I think I was the one who did the most grunt work around writing and turning out content and then doing a lot of the editing in the first number of years that we were around.
[00:06:23] Ian: November 2011 is the earliest post that I’ve been able to find.
[00:06:28] David: So we were doing some trials in November on Antonio’s site and the actual new site was launched in January of 2012. But we had some articles from the other site that we migrated over. And so there was a little bit of a question about how much of the other site to migrate over. So the real launch of Streets.mn as a thing was in 2012. But we had some articles that we backdated.
[00:06:55] Ian: Gotcha.
[00:06:55] David: Had been written before it and migrated over.
[00:06:58] Bill: There was Mike Hicks, who was a founding member of the group, had a blog about railroading called Hi/ Zeph/ 400, which if you’re a railroad nerd, you understand what that means. And then there was a guy, Reuben Collins, who had a blog about bicycles. And he’s now a bicycle planner and engineer for St. Paul. There was Alex Bowman had a blog called, maybe it was called Something About Minneapolis or, anyway, I forgot the name of it. But it was really interesting historical research about planning history. David Levinson had a blog, he’s a professor. So he had a lot more clout and institutional credibility than the rest of us. And sort of a vision for the kind of website that he wanted. He basically said that he wanted to do something like Greater Greater Washington, which is in DC. And it’s still around too. It’s a blog that runs around urban planning, land use and transportation. In fact, that was the first time I’d ever heard that distinction made.
[00:08:02] Ian: I’ve heard Streets.mn referred to as the Minnesota version of Streetsblog. And I understand that at some point there was a conversation about like whether or not to formally join Streetsblog. Because of course Streetsblog has the nationwide version of the publication. And then there are a bunch of local NYC dot Streets blog, Chicago dot Streets blog, et cetera. So what was that moment like?
[00:08:30] David: So in my mind, it was the Minnesota version of Greater Greater Washington. And that’s actually the thing that I was sort of modeling it on. GGW and Angie contacted Angie, who was at Streetsblog at the time. I don’t think she’s still there. Contacted us and asked if we were interested. And I mean, we didn’t want to lose control, I think was the main thing. It wasn’t obvious to us what the advantage of that would be. Most of their branches had like one or two authors. And so I mean, we’d be happy. I mean, I think what I would was trying to get, we didn’t really get it. We got a little bit of it. So like Jeff Woods weekly news summary is sort of-
[00:09:17] Ian: Oh, the national links?
[00:09:19] David: The national links, which he posts on GGW on one day. And then on like Mondays and our site on Fridays or something like that. It was sort of an aspect of that. I was hoping just that we would have a more regular content syndication type of thing where Streetsblog and Streetsblog did occasionally pull some articles, I think from Streets.mn and put them on their national site. We weren’t doing the reverse so much. You know, it wasn’t really relevant. But I think that was that was the idea I was hoping that would happen. I don’t know if that model would have actually worked. And then, you know, sort of blogging as a form has diminished some in the more recent years. So things have gone more over to newsletters and the model has changed for how people communicate. But I think, you know, originally it was sort of like an online magazine. And every day there’d be a new article. And, you know, if you’re reading this, then maybe this would be your entry point to all sorts of other transport and land use news nationwide and articles of interest. And then, you know, you could see articles from other sites on ours. But, you know, in the end that was probably just too much to manage. And we didn’t do that. There was the Urban MSP Forum, which Streets.mn was able to sort of merge with for a period of time. You know, those got branded as the Streets.mn forums. And, you know, I was hoping to bring the conversations together because there’s a bunch of people who are really interested in urbanism in a forum type of way, which is different than a blog post type of way. But hopefully there will be some overlap. There wasn’t really as much as there should have been. And then they became neglected by us and went their own way. And just how it is.
[00:11:49] Ian: And what was the workflow and cadence like back then?
[00:11:51] David: I think the intention was like once every two weeks, but not everyone could keep that schedule for other reasons. And then over time we started adding some, inviting some additional authors and writers to contribute and some additional people to be on the board after a little bit of time. And then, you know, some people would migrate off, some people would leave town.
[00:12:12] Ian: At some point it became like a much more of an open invitation. You know, hey, anybody who wants to write for us, like here’s a form that you can fill out to, you know, give us a story pitch kind of thing. Do you remember when that shift happened?
[00:12:28] David: So I think we put out an invitation to new writers in the second or third year. And it was more like I would go see somebody or we would go see somebody who was writing on topic and ask them if they wanted to post on Streets.mn or repost on Streets.mn. And then we gave them a writer account on the WordPress site. And if people contacted us, of course, we would be happy. Getting writers is the hard part. Getting people to volunteer their time to write something and who will write something good is the hard part. But we had gotten up to, and before I left, I think we were basically posting something every day of the week. And, you know, we had the cartoon on Sunday or comics. Andy Singer had a comic and it was like, you know, I thought it was a reasonable, regular pace. We had to implement editorial control. I mean, originally it was the authors for their own editors. And it was pretty laissez-faire. And then we had to implement editorial controls after something went up that we weren’t all happy with.
[00:13:41] Ian: Yeah, that’s the growing pains and the lessons learned for sure. Looking back, I’m sure it’s the kind of thing where it’s like, why did we ever think that it was going to work without any editorial process?
[00:13:55] David: Well, it might have worked with 10 people without an editorial process, right? But it wasn’t going to work with 20 or 30 or 40 writers without any editorial process. And so that became, you know, that was a pain point because, you know, getting people to volunteer to be editors is a little bit harder than getting them to volunteer to be writers. There’s not a lot of glory in editing. Yeah, it’s a place where people can debate at a high level transportation and land use ideas as applied to the Twin Cities, not where the organization began beginning from particular outcomes. Authors could do that, but the organization wouldn’t. And that was important because many of our board members were employed by government agencies and they didn’t want to be seen as taking positions. And so they had to themselves be careful about that. And again, this, you know, this is the narrow, a lot of transportation advocates are, in fact, people who work at cities and states and counties and so on. And they are worse consultants who have to be even more careful because you don’t know who your client is going to be. You have to be very careful about what you say.
[00:14:56] Ian: And I think that that is the value of Streets. It’s like, this is where the conversation happens.
[00:15:00] David: Yeah. And I mean, that’s the vision, right? I mean, people should be allowed to do that. And, you know, I think there might be some sort of general ideals that transportation and land use should be better. But then the question of what constitutes better is, you know, open. And I don’t think there’s anyone publicly advocating in a government agency, transportation and land use should be worse.
[00:15:19] Ian: Yeah. The phrase that I’ve always used when people are asking like, well, you know, would I be allowed to like write an article? Is like, as long as you are in good faith, trying to imagine a better future, like Streets.mn will publish whatever you have to say about like transportation and land use.
[00:15:38] Bill: So yeah, there’s been over the years like some test cases for that. We’re not going to publish this. This is not okay. And that was like a thing that happened. We had lots and lots of board meetings. I don’t know how many I went to. And then one of the things I’m proud of was being the chair of the mission committee. So our initial mission was very dry. And I forget what it was, but something about land use and transportation. And then we rewrote the mission a couple years before I left the board and came up with these four values or whatever. People centered, future oriented, justice driven, and delight cultivating. Oh, myself. Yeah, I love that. There was a group of three of us, Katie and then Happify and myself who worked on that. And I like it. I don’t know if you like it, but that was that’s something that we did.
[00:16:38] Ian: No, I love it. And like, and the delight cultivating is the one that’s probably the most like readers would be aware of that, you know, because that is literally a tag that, you know, like you can see exactly when there’s a piece that’s been published that like, oh, delight cultivating was like the goal of this particular article. So, yeah.
[00:17:00] Bill: I don’t want to gloss over that too. It sounds like kind of cheesy and, you know, like, oh, you go into the pottery barn and they have like, “live, laugh, love” on the wall. But I think as advocates or as bicyclists, you know, how easy it is to get filled with rage. I’ve been like that since Trump got reelected. So I’m feeling it all the time, man. And if you get so sort of focused on what’s wrong, it’s really not a good headspace to be. And you can overlook all the great things. You know, it’s really nice to ride a bike. Today I rode my bike around St. Paul. It was beautiful. The city’s beautiful. The streets aren’t totally potholed. And, you know, I had a great time and we should share positivity, not just critique. And like, that’s something that personally, I try to balance in my writing. And then at Streets.mn, I think it’s something I wanted to, a lot of folks wanted to just put at the center. It’s like, we need to talk about why it’s fun to walk the bike and see people on the bus and live in a city and not just go on and on about pork chop islands being dangerous, which they are, you know, you’ve got to balance it all out.
[00:18:18] Ian: Right, right. And like, then that can be a really effective strategy as well, you know, with like, I don’t think that anybody was really taking like, remove I-94 seriously as an idea until Our Streets came forward and presented like, hey, here’s some literal images of like what this could look like and how great it could be if we converted it into a boulevard. And like, you know, that’s kind of the model that I’m thinking of with delight cultivating is like, yeah, what are the positive visions for the future that we can present?
[00:18:57] Bill: The main thing that’s different back then was that the comment section would be full of honest, earnest conversation that wasn’t just trolling, it wasn’t just spam garbage of people who would like write in about, “hey, I think Nicollet Mall should be pedestrianized” or “I think that’s terrible” or “you overlooked this detail about the AADT of Cedar Avenue and actually it’s…” and the thing that was always interesting was if you just had someone write a thousand words about some project, you’d have 50 comments and many of them would be really interesting back and forth about details and referencing all this other stuff. So you could learn a ton just from reading the comments on the pieces.
[00:19:50] Ian: Right, right.
[00:19:50] Bill: And over the years that changed and there’s a lot of reasons for that.
[00:19:54] Ian: So from what I remember of the comment section, anybody could comment, you didn’t need like a writer account, you just needed to put in, you know, your name and an email address I think. And then it would be associated with, you know, like a profile picture for you. We had volunteer moderators, which seems even less glamorous than volunteer editing. I don’t think that it was easy to convince people, you know, to go and do that work for us. And from what I remember, the volume of comments became too much for the moderators to keep up with. So for a while, the board adopted a policy where comments would only be turned on for a particular post if the author of that piece agreed to be the moderator for the comments. And I thought that was a pretty good system. I always opted to turn on the comments for every podcast episode that was being published at that time. And honestly, like the podcast episodes got way fewer comments than most other pieces, probably because of the length of them, you know, it’s a lot easier for people to read a short piece and then comment on it. But yeah, unfortunately, the board decided that we were going to turn off comments entirely. And this was done in such a way that comments disappeared from all articles across the entire site, including old articles that, you know, like weren’t really accepting new comments anymore anyway. So a lot of those valuable conversations have been lost. They’re no longer on the site. And I’m a little sad about that. So you were the host of the podcast, the first iteration of the podcast. When about did that start?
[00:21:43] Bill: 2012.
[00:21:44] Ian: Pretty darn early.
[00:21:45] Bill: I think I did like 130 podcast episodes. And that again was like just a labor of love too. And I don’t know why I started doing it. I was trying to think about that question and I can’t answer it.
[00:22:03] Ian: And if any listeners want to go back and find old episodes, like they are still online, they’re still accessible, you just cannot find them in this feed. If you are like listening on a podcast player, you have to go to the Streets.mn website and look in the podcast category. And if you scroll far enough, you’ll find some old ones.
[00:22:22] Bill: Yeah, I did. I just scrolled to August 5th, 2012 where I interviewed this guy who’s a very online dude named Ed Kohler who rode 26 miles on nice ride bikes using different nice rides to all the different stations. And I had a lot of fun conversations with people. The audio quality was really terrible for the first six months for sure. It took me a while to figure out how to record these in a proper way. I think I was actually inspired by baseball podcasting.
[00:22:53] Ian: Okay.
[00:22:53] Bill: To be honest. Yeah, I’m a big fan of the Gleeman and the Geek Podcast which is about baseball and the Twins. And so that’s probably what I tried to copy or emulate.
[00:23:05] Ian: Yeah. And I remember your episodes a lot of times you would be having conversations with like candidates and stuff.
[00:23:15] Bill: Oh, yeah. I did as much as I could for city council and a couple with county commissioner candidates. I did a couple mayoral candidates. Not the winning ones. I would try. I tried to cover all the city council races and that was a lot. The reason I did is because initially I interviewed someone for Ward 5 city council race. Amy Brendmoen was her name.
[00:23:44] Ian: Oh, sure.
[00:23:45] Bill: After she got elected. She remembered that, you know and she supported bikes really hard throughout her entire career.
[00:23:55] Ian: Are you taking credit for all of that right now, Bill?
[00:23:58] Bill: No, but I am willing to. Hi, Amy. If you’re listening to not I’m sure, but no. But reaching out to people before they get elected is really a good idea. They’re still learning at that point and they’re still listening to people and you can still affect, you know, the direction of what they might do.
[00:24:19] Ian: Yeah, yeah. I remember that your episodes were often like being recorded on location for lack of a better term. Like what was your favorite place that you ever recorded a podcast?
[00:24:33] Bill: Well, my friend and I, Alex Bowman, I had him explain public housing to me but we were in a crowded restaurant called Nong Bistro RIP. And that was terrible audio but it was a really fun conversation. John Edwards, what he’s doing now is next level stuff. It’s really great. On a boat.
[00:24:54] Ian: I feel like he’s like backing himself into a corner right now. Like every episode from now on, he’s going to have to think of a more exotic location or like a weirder stick to have during the episode. Like, oh, we’re doing a bunk bed hammock situation. We’re on a canoe now. Like what’s next?
[00:25:16] Bill: Sky’s the limit and I mean that like hot air balloon.
[00:25:19] Ian: Sure. Yeah, that could be a fun mapping related. Like, oh, I get to see everything from the top. Are there any moments from Streets.mn History that you look back on particularly fondly?
[00:25:33] David: Well, I mean, I think the very early years were fun. I mean, it became less fun for me and I guess probably for everybody. It became less fun as it after it, you know, year four, five. But, you know, the first year as we were building it, I think it was growing fast. We were seeing a lot more readers for our work than we had before. We were getting influential. You know, we won City Pages’ Best Local Blog one year. You know, that was, I think that was a marker. You know, and people were recognizing who we were and so we were starting to, I think, have some effect on the conversation. And, you know, our writers would, I mean, me and Bill and others as well would get, you know, interviews and things like that about local topics on media. And so the visibility was going up and that’s good.
[00:26:27] Bill: Nate wrote a piece about parking in downtown St. Paul where he, like, timed how he found a parking spot in like eight seconds or, you know, two minutes within each time he went downtown. It was nice because he brought the receipts. He, like, actually had photos to illustrate how easy it is.
[00:26:47] Ian: Nice. Yeah. And that sounds like, that sounds like a great, like today would be a great candidate for, like, a video piece, which segues me into the next question, which is, you know, okay, Streets is, you know, a bit different than it was in the early days. What are you, like, excited about to see in the future for Streets?
[00:27:10] Bill: A video is something I think is really amenable to urbanism conversations because it’s one thing to talk about the street width and the lane width and the sidewalk width of a bike trail or, like, Lyndale Avenue or whatever, right? But it’s another thing if you can see it and feel the traffic going by and or the, you know, the birds singing in the tree, you know, to see it and hear it is. So that’s, I think, a really appealing thing. We’d had this guy, Matty Lang, who had been one of our original people, too, who had video skills. And we made a few video pieces early on that, it turned out to be so labor-intensive that we didn’t, couldn’t ask Matty to do that anymore. And he didn’t want to. But I do remember him shooting this thing about 26, 26th Street South in South Minneapolis. Or, yeah, 26th Street. The East-West one, that’s one way. And you can drive way too fast on it. And this is before they put in the protected bike lane that’s there. So it was just, like, absolute chaos of cars going by and just terrible. So I think having that content would be awesome. I’m excited for Streets.mn thriving. I think it’s been doing great in the last few years. I like reading it. I read almost everything that’s put on the website.
[00:28:35] Ian: Yeah, and I hear from some of your students that you, like, assign articles in class to read.
[00:28:42] Bill: Yeah. So I’m teaching full-time now at the U of M in the Urban Studies program. So I have a lot less free time on my hands. And a four-year-old also that keeps me busy.
[00:28:54] David: It’s good to see that it’s still active, right? So a lot of these things that were started in the early 2000s, you know, have sort of faded. And I think that’s, you know, too bad. I mean, the media change. And so, and of course the people involved, these are very thin individually or very thin organizations involving a few key players typically. And I think one of the good things about Streets.mn is it had a much broader base. And so that, you know, if somebody had to drop out, there would be other people around. You know, and so you don’t want a thing that’s just driven by one or two people because they get a different job or they’re interest change or whatever.
[00:29:35] Ian: Or they move, you know, halfway around the world.
[00:29:37] David: They move halfway around the world. And I’m not the only one on the original board who’s left Minnesota, right? People move.
[00:29:45] Ian: All right, Bill, did you have any other thoughts about Streets.mn that you wanted to share that I haven’t asked about?
[00:29:52] Bill: Just that I’m so proud of all the people working on it right now, including yourself, Ian, and the wonderful board and Amy Gage, who’s awesome, you know, she deserves to retire. And it’s great to read it and see something thriving that I helped have a part in for a while. So I think Streets.mn is great. And give them some money. I donate to Streets.mn. Everyone who likes the content and believes that cities are important, that living together is important, that like having, you know, places where your kids can run on the sidewalk and you don’t have to freak out is something valuable. Like I kind of, there should be more parent stuff. This is like my personal perspective now. It’s like, oh, playground reviews and, you know, speed limits in the alleys. And what do we do to create like actual woonerfs or how do I make the Charles Avenue bike boulevard actually happen? I don’t know if I have it in me to actually follow through on this, but yeah, it’d be nice. It’d be nice to start a little revolution over here.
[00:31:05] Ian: It’s, you know, it’s all volunteer driven. So if you want to see some, some, some, uh, playground reviews, like, hey, start a thing. And, um, well, I mean, you, you mentioned like the today’s episode, today’s article was a Let’s Stroll, you know, and that’s one of the first versions of like a thing that one person started and then, you know, was like, Hey, anybody else want to contribute to this same concept? Like let’s make it a series. And I do remember like over the years, there have been different like kind of in-jokes and like common threads that have happened. Which is fun to see, you know? And it’s like, it’s, it’s the community definitely like evolves over time and different that, you know, like I don’t think there are any more, uh, Festivus references on there.
[00:31:53] Bill: April Fool’s Day used to be just a field day for nerdy, nerdy humor. Thanks for listening. Uh, thanks for supporting Streets.mn everybody. Also, anyone can write an article. Like you don’t have, this is something else, like you don’t have to be an expert. Just share your perspective about the street. You’re, you are an expert on the street that you live on and use every day. So you don’t, you don’t have to have a PhD in geography to write for Streets.mn.
[00:32:30] Ian: All right. So here we are sitting down with Amy Gage, who is the outgoing managing editor of Streets.mn. And Cirien Saadeh, who is the incoming managing editor of Streets.mn. And we’re going to talk about the recent past of, of Streets, of, you know, how it has evolved over the last few years. And, and getting into where are we going in the future? This is kind of a fortuitous, we’re making this episode right when we’re having this handoff period for the one and only paid staff position in the organization currently is the managing editor. So, Amy, let’s start with you. You came, like, what was your background before, before coming to Streets?
[00:33:22] Amy: The first half of my career was in journalism. And so, as I said at my farewell at the picnic, this has been a blessing and a gift for me to get to come full circle these last three plus years after I left full-time work to return to journalism, which, which really is my first love.
[00:33:48] Ian: Because what did you do in the between time?
[00:33:51] Amy: I was, I went into higher ed marketing and communications initially at St. Olaf College in Northfield. That’s where my husband and I were raising our children. And the commute just got brutal. The commute to downtown Minneapolis. I was at two magazines downtown, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Twin Cities Business. So, I started very briefly doing media relations at St. Olaf, which was a natural fit because a lot of journalists knew me and they trusted me and I very quickly evolved to become director of marketing communications there. From there, took a bigger version of that job at St. Kate’s where I actually met Cirien. And that was at the time when St. Kate’s was going from becoming a women’s college into a university with a growing number of graduate programs that also admitted men and other gender identities. So that was an exciting and evolving time for St. Kate’s. I ended my full-time career as director of neighborhood and community relations at St. Thomas, which was probably the most challenging position at that, at that university. Lots of dog walking and biking into drunken parties. Just a lot to deal with, which could be its own podcast episode. But I started with Streets. I’m just looking at my first article, which was published on March 29th of 2017. I knew of Streets. I admired it. I had commuted for 14 of my 20 years in Northfield and I truly felt like I owed something back to the planet. And my first car, my first story was about selling my car because I lived walking distance from where I worked at the time. So I knew of Bill. I went to and very much admired his work, Bill Lindeke. And I was buddies with one of the early female board members, Betsey Buckheit in Northfield. And I credit both Bill and Betsey with really encouraging me to get more involved. So fast forward. When I was hired in this position in June of 2022, I had already been a volunteer weekly copy editor for off and on for four or five years, which made it, I think, helpful to step into this position because I knew a lot of the behind the scenes work. But Bill had left for his own reasons. And Bill essentially, I call Bill Lindeke the engine of Streets. He calls himself the co-founder, but I call him the engine. And when Bill left and evolved into his wonderful Minnpost column and his teaching work at the U, Bill was essentially functioning as the managing editor. And when I came on board, the editorial volunteers at the time were literally having trouble publishing a story a day. They were having trouble generating enough content. So in June of 2022, I think I actually started in May, but the initial bar that I had to clear was publish every day, publish five days a week. And we were immensely proud of that. And that bar didn’t raise for a few months. Our problem now, three plus years later, and I always say it’s a great problem to have, is that we have more content than we can publish. And Streets in its early days was like that. I do miss something that Betsey Buckheit used to do, which ended in 2019 when she went off the board. She did a Sunday Summary, which I really enjoyed and which I find very valuable when I’m searching our archives for stories. But our newsletter now…
[00:37:49] Ian: Yeah, it kind of serves that purpose a little bit.
[00:37:51] Amy: Yeah. Yeah. And I know Joe Harrington, our incoming editor-in-chief, feels very strong that we need a newsletter, and he soon wants to take it. So…
[00:38:03] Ian: There you go. The timing, and I had never really thought of it this way before, but the timing is very interesting too that we relaunched the podcast around the same time in May of 2022.
[00:38:15] Amy: Although you and I obviously get along well, we haven’t worked very closely together.
[00:38:20] Ian: That’s true.
[00:38:20] Amy: I jokingly tell you that I handle the print side, which speaks to my background in newspapers and magazines. But I think Streets has become really robust these past three years. And that is in no small… All credit also to the podcast, which you consistently publish on the first and the 15th. And I love it that we have different forms of storytelling and actually hope that that can expand as I move on.
[00:38:53] Ian: All right. So let’s take a step back here. We’ve talked about… We’ve got this managing editor. We’ve mentioned the daily editors. We’ve got an editor-in-chief. What are all those pieces of the puzzle? How do they all fit together? Yeah, what are the different roles that happen within Streets right now?
[00:39:16] Amy: The old saying back when I was managing editor on a magazine was that the managing editor makes the trains run on time. And maybe that’s appropriate for Streets. Everything revolves around the managing editor. I mean, this is just… You’re the hub of the wheel. That’s probably a good image to have. I have primary, if not exclusive, contact with the writers, with the contributors. The stories come into me. So it all kind of lands in the managing editor’s lap. Cirien is obviously asking me about organizing tools. And the best one we have… I actually only created about a year ago. The first couple of years, this was all in my head and on sheets of paper sitting on my very large standing desktop here at home. But I have a run sheet which looks out right now we’re solid through next week with stories, with three of the five days the last week of August filled. And that’s about as far ahead as I want to go because you want to leave room for timely things. Pieces will come in unexpectedly, but it’s also the managing editor’s role. And this was really one of… In addition to publishing every day, one of my initial priorities was just getting out there. Working my network, finding, you know, basically hitting people up to write. My goal is to have a writer say, you improved my story. You helped me sound better. And that’s what I often say to writers. My job is to help you look good. And so from me doing the deeper dive content edit, this morning, for example, I spent a good hour going through tomorrow’s story. It needs contextualizing. It needs more of the writer’s voice. There are things I don’t understand. There are things that could risk being miscommunicated. So he got a long email from me, which I copied Cirien with lots of bold face, capitalized questions, and he’ll get that back to me today. I will then get it to a copy editor. So the copy editors really put the finishing touches on the story. If there’s video, which I wish we had more of, they work with photos. They work with AP style. They work with alt text for people who are visually impaired. They’re, I mean, I could, for five minutes, there’s just a checklist.
[00:41:49] Ian: Yeah, there’s a whole checklist. Oh, yeah.
[00:41:51] Amy: That they need to do. And the editor in chief is my go-to if ethical questions come up, legal questions. We published a story recently. I want to be a little careful, but a citizen organization in St. Paul that is known to be litigious, that is known to threaten the city with lawsuits, came at me with a whole bunch of questions. And I had a lot of dialogue with the outgoing editor in chief, Micah Davison, that morning.
[00:42:29] Ian: Identifying people who have potential stories to tell on Streets.mn. Amy, I would love to hear more about how you figure out, because if somebody has this idea in their head and they haven’t said it out loud, how do we as an organization find the people who have things to say about the communities, about the physical space that they live in? And the ways that we go about trying to find those stories affects what the focus is of the publication in some pretty profound ways.
[00:43:12] Amy: It’s true. I have done it with a combination of digging back into the archives and trying to pull out writers whom I really enjoyed to truly just working the vast network of people I know. And having had my entire career in this community has really helped that. And communicate, communicate, communicate. I mean, that’s, I spend a ton of time on email. I do a lot of coffee dates. It helps to go out to things. I also am on contract with BikeMN, and those things dovetail well. But I’m basically always talking about Streets. When I meet with people, “hey, that’d be a good story.” It’s probably one of my favorite lines. I think before we transition to Cirien, I think the real challenge we have, and I’ve been honest with the board about this from the start, when you are not paying writers, it is almost impossible to assign. And I would say I felt this most acutely in when I started in 2022, when George Floyd Square was trying to develop. And I very much wanted us to cover that story as closely as we covered the Summit Avenue Bike Trail, where I had no shortage of writers, partly because I’m so well-networked over here in the transportation community. But I was less well-networked at 38th and Chicago, and in that community. And that is always just my prime example of if we paid writers, I could have hired somebody. And that for me has been the primary challenge of finding people.
[00:44:50] Ian: So yeah, Cirien, what’s your background in journalism? Or where has life taken you?
[00:44:58] Cirien: Well, first of all, I’m super excited to be here. I started as a student journalist at St. Kate’s back in the day. I had worked for the student newspaper and then as a reporter and then as news editor for about three years. In 2010, I met a man named Ned Moore who used to work at St. Kate’s and is now at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. And by that time, I had been doing kind of community organizing work for about five years. I didn’t really have a name for the work that I had done for the work I was doing, but I came to understand it had been community organizing. Ned connected me with a local group. And at the same time, I started interning for an organization named The Uptake. So I was going through my community organizing apprenticeship at the same time and my journalism internship. And I realized pretty quickly that these were parallel paths in what I wanted to do with them. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing with them, but I knew that I was going to be walking them at the same time for a while. I’ve been an organizer on campaigns related to immigration, transit, small businesses, housing, and everything over the years. And it’s remained kind of the core of my work. One of the areas in which I’ve been a community organizer is through community journalism work, right? And specifically through community journalism education. When I was doing my master’s at Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, I started to study newspapers that had come out of movements in the past. Labor movements in California, the Black Panther community newspaper, Chicano and Black Resistance newspapers, projects that’s the community papers that still exist. And I started to become really deeply obsessed with the idea that our community movements need to have community newspapers. And they need to have media literacy because if we’re going to get in front of this disinformation space, we need to be building media literacy and community literacy. And we need our newspapers, our community spaces for that. So at the time, I didn’t really have the language for disinformation, but I ended up going from my PhD at Prescott College in sustainability education. And my focus there was on community journalism education as a way to build power in our most marginalized communities, right? Because of that work and because of the nature of my community journalism education work, I was able to develop a curriculum. And I’ve got about 20 modules, 25 modules, but I also offer it as a class at the college I teach at. My college is actually launching it as two microcredentials, the first two of several microcredentials this October as we beta test a community education project at our college. And I have taught hundreds of workshops in the Twin Cities, including several at Macalester. At the Uptake I ran five different internship and fellowship programs. I have done trainings with different organizations. Sometimes they’re one-off, sometimes they’re long-term. I’ve mentored dozens of individuals. And I’ve been really lucky to be able to do that work and bring that kind of commitment to community journalism education, disrupting disinformation, but also the sense that community journalism is the responsibility of community movements and anything that is fighting for a better world. It’s just as much the responsibility of organizers as it is reporters. And so that’s where my space’s work has been. I am not, I don’t consider myself a professional journalist. I consider myself a community-trained journalist and a trained community organizer. And for me, journalism is a tool I use as a community organizer. Not so much what I had once thought it would be to separate paths that I would take simultaneously. And what I quickly learned was journalism for me is the tool I use as a community organizer.
[00:48:50] Ian: So given that background, I’m trying to think of the context of Streets.mn. Like, does that match up nicely with the notion of a movement that then formed a newspaper in order to serve that purpose? Or are we the inverse? Did the newspaper come first and then a community built around that?
[00:49:17] Cirien: I think that’s really interesting. So, I mean, a lot of these movement movements, we’re talking about, you know, Cesar Chavez in the fields building a newspaper. These were like intensive emotional newspapers. I don’t know enough to be able to say whether Streets is just another in the line in the kind of map of what it means to do movement reporting. But what I do know is people cared enough about wanting to have, you know, a world that isn’t car dependent to say, hey, we should start telling stories about what the alternatives look like. And that is in line as far as I would ever say. I mean, it’s definitely a different place on the map, but I think it’s on the map. For sure, we’ll think about that. I think the other thing for me is I, a few years ago, I know that there’s a lot of work left to actually put this into practice, but so I had come across Streets because I was teaching a community journalism workshop for a class at MCTC with Lena Jones, and one of your old directors, former co-directors was in the class. He wasn’t a co-director yet. His name was Tim, I believe it was. And he was in the space and had come across this idea that I had talked about a racial equity impact assessment and went back to Streets and said we should do this. There was a call for proposals. I had found out about the RFP, the request for proposals, and submitted my own application saying I’d love to do this. I think, especially in our community newspapers, where we’re talking about issues that are impacting communities of color, but we don’t necessarily have that representation. It’s really important to have that racial equity assessment so that we can say, okay, these are the steps we need to take to to bring folks here also, but to also make sure we’re creating that space to build something aligned. And I was able to go in, I know there’s a ton of work left to do to implement that a lot of that work is just starting. I’m excited to be part of that, hopefully. I haven’t had those discussions yet, but I’m hoping to be part of it and to sit and think about, okay, what can we do? For example, one of the things that I’ve learned, and it’s a bit of a hypothesis, but I’ve practiced it a few times now, if you can’t pay people to be community journalists, sometimes you can train them to be community journalists. And while they won’t be with you long-term, the turn of, we can’t pay you, but we’ll give you the skills to do this so you don’t have that experience, but we’ll train you, can sometimes be really-
[00:51:47] Ian: We’re kind of an incubator.
[00:51:49] Cirien: Yeah, right. And that model sometimes works. It worked at the Uptake. We were able to bring over the course of five years, almost 60 different writers, and we couldn’t keep them all because once they got training, they’d go on. But we had some folks we were paying, and we had some folks we were training, and that helped.
[00:52:05] Ian: Nice.
[00:52:05] Amy: I think we can’t overemphasize the importance of Cirien having done our racial equity analysis. That work was done primarily with the board, and she and I have talked about that, that I think it’s vitally important that the editorial team become more engaged in that work, and they will under Cirien. So I am very excited about where Cirien can take this publication and diversify it. While I’m extremely proud of the work that we have all done together at Streets, I did not succeed in diversifying the publication in the way that I know we want to do. And so just as I stood on Bill Lindeke’s shoulders when I started, now Cirien can launch from the foundation we’ve built and really open us up to this community. And I’m excited about that.
[00:52:59] Ian: Yeah. Yeah. So Cirien, how does the background of thinking about newspapers and movements, and how does that inform the approach for trying to bring in potential stories, identify people who have these stories to tell?
[00:53:19] Cirien: I’m editing a writer’s story right now. It’s my first assignment. I’m shepherding it through, and then I’ve got a second story that I pitched to a writer and I’m working with them through. And for the first story, it was actually given to me, and I did the editing, and I went back to the writer and I said, here’s the edits. Really great job on all these things. Here’s some things to work on. And also, it might not be for the story, but how about, you know, talking, we want to talk about what it means to invest in bike infrastructure. So what does it mean for us to talk about this when we talk about communities of color who have less car ownership, right? But they also don’t have that infrastructure for bikes. So just that kind of equity angle, how do we go there? And with the second story, it was honestly street safety for protests. What does it mean to be safe in our streets when we’re at protests and rallies, right? When we’re seeing more and more of these protests and rallies get targeted by people who want to be violent, right? Cars driven through protests, people getting hurt. These are not far off ideas anymore, right? They haven’t been for decades for a lot of communities, but right now they’re everywhere, right? What does it mean for us to think about how we keep people safe when they’re fighting for their own rights, right? Or for the rights of other people? I just try and always bring that equity perspective to those stories. That’s where my, I will, I want to keep going in line with the street stories. I think we have an amazing combination of community exploration, which I absolutely want to double down on those because those community exploration stories are so much fun and so useful. And I think when people feel a sense of ownership for the place that they are at, they actually feel a sense of responsibility to the place they are at, right? So exploring things like breweries in a community or why they aren’t there, it gives people a sense of place. It gives people a sense of ownership and a sense of curiosity. Every community is its own little world and you want to explore all the different pieces of that. The equity stories are where I especially want to try and bring those stories. The community journalism trainings are going to be a tool I use trying to educate people, do some mentorship. I’ve got a list of writers in my back pocket. I will be asking for favors from folks like, hey, can you do some of these? Because if people see us doing some of that reporting, I think it might open up the door to other folks wanting to come in. Like, hey, you did this story. I’m not a writer, but I’d love to learn how to talk about this piece of it. What I really am excited about in this job and maybe most scared of in this job is that, A) I get to build off of what Amy has done and that feels scary and exciting to me because I’ve seen that Amy’s brilliant in this work and have had a chance to work with Amy as a writer twice for Streets on two stories that I’m deeply proud of. And the second part I’m excited and terrified of is that I don’t know what six months from now on this job’s gonna look like, right? But I’m excited to use what I have and try and put it together. And I will say, I’m only 12, 13 days into this job. I have still three weeks of onboarding in front of me. I’m still meeting with folks. I still have to meet with all the members of the board or various members of the board and committees. I don’t know what’s next for me in this work. I don’t know what the totality of this work looks like. So I’m talking right now from two meetings with Amy and working on a couple of stories with writers. I know nothing else of what’s coming this month.
[00:56:46] Ian: So I mean, exciting new world, right?
[00:56:50] Cirien: Exciting, terrified. We’re right on that teeter totter.
[00:56:54] Amy: And I want to say, as I prepared a list this morning of things that I wanted to make sure I covered, I truly was grateful that the last thing I wrote down was that I recognized that it’s time for me to move on. I have said somewhat tongue-in-cheek that I don’t want to be the Joe Biden of Streets.mn. I recognized when the copy editors and I met with Micah Davison, our outgoing editor-in-chief about a month ago, and I listened to those young people talk about the technology they want to bring in, the editing tools they want to bring in. And it was exciting to me that in six months, like Cirien, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I know that it’s going to be different. And I am excited about that. And immensely proud of the work that we all do. You’ve heard me say this, Ian, but the values of the people on this volunteer team and what they give to this effort is really stunning to me. And it has really been a privilege to be part of it for over three years. And I can’t wait to see now where Cirien takes it.
[00:58:10] Ian: Cirien, Amy, thank you so much for joining us on the Streets.mn Podcast.
[00:58:15] Cirien: Thank you for the invite.
[00:58:17] Amy: Thank you for all the work you and your team do.
[00:58:20] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial, non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was hosted, edited, and transcribed by me, Ian R. Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community blog and podcast and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one-time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #streetsmnpodcast. Until next time, take care.