Endalkachew H Chala

Endalkachew H Chala

Researcher of media and communication in liminal communities

Framing Local Publics Reflections Nonprofit News

1 minute read

Published:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been laying the groundwork for a digital content analysis project focused on nonprofit journalism in the Twin Cities. The aim is to examine how two prominent local outlets—MinnPost and Sahan Journal—frame structurally embedded issues such as public safety, education, and environmental justice, and in doing so, how they construct and define their publics.

This research is part of a broader inquiry into how nonprofit newsrooms imagine their audiences, center or marginalize voices, and navigate their civic role in the digital age.

🔍 What I’ve Done So Far

This initial phase has focused on data collection and methodological design:

  • Scraped and structured full-text articles from MinnPost’s Metro section and Sahan Journal’s Democracy & Politics section, covering the period from March to December 2024.
  • Created a coding sheet with auto-generated variables like topic tags and word count, and included placeholders for manual coding (e.g., tone, framing, source type).
  • Built a term co-occurrence network using Sahan Journal’s articles to visualize how key ideas and issues cluster in discourse.
  • Shared the entire dataset and workflow on GitHub:
    👉 nonprofit-news-twin-cities

✳️ Why This Matters

In an era where local journalism is increasingly precarious, nonprofit news organizations are stepping into the role of community narrators. But how they define that “community,” whose voices they amplify, and what civic actions they imagine for their audiences—all remain critical questions.

This project aims to surface how editorial decisions reflect assumptions about the public, and how coverage choices may shape civic life.

🤝 Invitation to Collaborate

This project is ongoing. I plan to resume it shortly with deeper qualitative coding, expanded comparative analysis, and eventually, a peer-reviewed article.

If you’re a researcher working on nonprofit media, digital publics, or journalistic discourse—and would like to collaborate—I’d love to connect. The repository is open, the methodology transparent, and the conversation just beginning.

Thanks for following along. I’ll share updates here and in the repo as the project evolves.

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