Minnesota — and MPR — kept everyone’s attention at the start of 2026 | Nieman Journalism Lab

Minnesota Public Radio’s coverage of ICE put it at the top of the traffic rankings for public media websites in the last quarter of 2025. That trend continued in the first quarter of 2026; according to our regular rankings derived from Similarweb data, MPR saw 7 million more visits in January than in December, driven in large part by its coverage after federal agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

“What’s interesting to me is less the volume than what the audience came looking for,” Michael Olson, deputy digital managing editor at MPR, told me in an email. “They weren’t chasing breaking alerts.” He continued:

They were looking for context and wondering what is true and trustworthy in a highly charged environment flooded with disinformation. Stories that explained or contextualized stood out and earned the time of our audience. We also saw high social shares from our followers, who appeared motivated to help their friends and family understand what was happening in Minnesota. They wanted the people they care about to get the information from a credible source that provides full access freely available without a paywall.

The top-performing single story from that period was about a police chief in the small town of St. Peter getting federal agents to release a resident they’d taken into custody, Olson told me.

Donations also picked up tremendously during this period: according to Jeff Moores, MPR’s director of membership, the station pulled in 25,000 new members and counting in fiscal year 2026, up from 14,000 in FY25 and 8,000 in FY24. That’s the most new members MPR has ever gained in a single year, driven by both the station’s coverage of ICE and by cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; 4,000 new members signed up in December and January alone.

“People want a local source they can trust to make sense of what’s happening. When a national story lands in Minnesota, that’s an important moment that we have to deliver on,” Olson wrote. “[MPR] journalists were already on the beat and the audience knew where to find them.”

In March, Nebraska Public Media and KUT in Austin, Texas, saw some of the biggest jumps in website visits. In Nebraska, the increase mainly came from people who were looking for information about the biggest wildfires in the state’s history. According to Maggie Berndt, director of communications and engagement at the station, the March 14 special edition of the Nebraska Update podcast was the show’s top-performing episode since it launched in November of last year. The podcast, and a Facebook post promoting those special reports, seem to have been the main drivers of the 211,000 or so more visits to the Nebraska Public Media website compared to February, a jump of more than 80%.

At KUT, which saw about 110% more traffic in March than in February, visits were largely driven by coverage of a mass shooting at a bar and busy street in Austin, as well as coverage of the state’s smokable hemp ban.

“Every smokable hemp ban story — by our transportation reporter, Nathan Bernier — has gotten a lot of attention,” wrote Andy Jechow, KUT’s director of digital audience strategy, in an email. “Nathan says he had noticed the general news coverage on this topic was missing some nuance, specifically when it came to covering the science of cannabis. As a result, his stories are rich in detail.”

Bernier has also been experimenting with longform videos on YouTube, which Jechow says have garnered high interest. Additionally, Jechow told me that KUT has been stressing the importance of SEO to its editors and reporters, and its SEO strategy includes limiting search headlines to 60 characters, inserting SEO keywords into every story in the CMS, and creating list of bad SEO terms to avoid in URLs. That strategy worked in March; KUT got a traffic boost from Google Discover for its shooting and smokable hemp ban coverage.

“I’m definitely concerned about the impact of AI search on our website and our overall digital strategy, but I have yet to see any kind of noticeable drop in traffic that some national publishers have reported,” Jechow wrote. “I feel like our website is in the strongest position it’s ever been in, and our data backs that up. With that said, things could flip upside down tomorrow.”

Here are the individual rankings for Q1 2026, broken up by month.

Update, May 14: The headline of this story was changed to reflect the fact that Minnesota has multiple public radio stations.