News Diaries: How a Minnesota mom and minister 'blew past' her screen time limits when ICE came to her city
To say that the staff of Nieman Lab consume more news than the average American would be an understatement. And if you’re a Nieman Lab reader, chances are you’re a news junkie like us.
Most of the people that most news organizations are trying to reach, however, are not news junkies. Nieman Lab founder Josh Benton likes to remind us that the average American received zero push notifications from a news organization in the last week. Only 16% of Americans pay for news.
So we often discuss how we might better see beyond our own news habits. In this new occasional series, “News Diaries,” we’ll talk with people who are not professional journalists about their habits for finding and consuming news, and what counts as news to them. We’re interested in the ways news does, or doesn’t, fit into people’s lives, and the roles traditional news outlets, informal networks, and everything in between play in keeping people informed.
For the first entry in this series, I spoke with (a different) Sophie, 37. She’s a minister and mom of two who lives in Minneapolis, her hometown. We talked in mid-February, toward the end of the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which sent more than 3,000 federal agents into Minnesota to arrest undocumented immigrants; agents killed two American citizens.
My conversation with Sophie, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Zooming out, we started with you mentioning how much more, not just news, but screen time this Operation Metro Surge has kind of forced onto your life. You’re, I imagine, too much in the thick of it to really know how this will play out. But do you have any reflections on how your long-term habits of consuming local information and news may have been changed by this experience?
I’ll probably increase my financial contribution to public radio because I’m so grateful. Hopefully my screen time will go down. I’m going to have to recalibrate some habits around that. But, I mean, I wasn’t really using Signal until the fall…now Signal is my primary conversation platform. I don’t think that will go away. I think Signal will continue to be a place where people are sharing information, and [a] top source of community connection.
It’s kind of nice because, again, we don’t just have television on. They don’t just naturally see news stories. But my six-year-old — we got in the car and the radio just turns on to Minnesota Public Radio, and that’s where he heard about Liam Ramos being taken. And he was like, “Mom, they took a five-year-old?” And I was like, yep.
That probably wasn’t something I would have explained to him, because it would have felt too close. But he heard it because the radio turned on before I could stop it. They definitely overhear things, and then I have to figure out how to explain. So it’s been a balance of how much do I tell them up front, and how much do I respond to because they’ve just heard it. But because it’s so prevalent — I knew they would hear about Renée Good at school or that something would come up. And so I’ve preemptively told them about certain things, but in really vague terms, or in age-appropriate terms.
We go to church right around the corner from where they killed Alex Pretti. So there’s no avoiding it, because we drive by that site on our way to church.