An editor’s diary on the Minnesota primary results, party infighting, and why local newsrooms keep covering national races they have no stake in
Half my editorial meeting this morning went to arguing about Peggy Flanagan beating Angie Craig in the Minnesota Senate primary, and not one person in that room lives within eight hundred miles of Minnesota. That’s the job now, apparently. We cover the national mood swing of a party as though it’s local news because, in some genuinely diffuse way, it is. Progressive beats moderate again, third time this cycle by my count, and everyone in the room had a theory about what it means for the actual midterms.
What Actually Got Argued About
Our newest hire made the case that this is simply the base rewarding candidates who show up and fight rather than candidates who triangulate, and honestly I didn’t have a great counterargument. Our longest-serving reporter thinks it’s a symptom of primary turnout skewing toward whoever’s most online, which is also probably true and also probably doesn’t fully explain it. We didn’t resolve anything. We rarely do. That’s fine, that’s what the meeting is actually for.
The Story We Almost Didn’t Run
Buried further down the wire was the Abraham Lincoln story, sailors reporting mental health strain and supply problems during an extended deployment, serious enough that Senate Democrats are now pressing the Pentagon directly for answers, while a second carrier heads toward the same region. That’s the story that actually kept me up, not the primary. A ship full of exhausted people getting quietly reinforced rather than relieved is the kind of story that reads like a footnote until it isn’t one anymore.
Why I Keep Running Both Kinds Of Stories Side By Side
Because readers deserve to see the primary chatter and the deployment story on the same page, honestly. One tells you where the party thinks its energy is. The other tells you what the actual machinery of government is doing to real people while everyone argues about messaging. I try to run them close together specifically so nobody scrolls past one without at least glancing at the other.
What I Told The Newsroom By The End Of The Meeting
Cover the primary, absolutely, it matters for November. But somebody chase the Lincoln story properly, follow up on what the Pentagon actually says, don’t let it die after one wire pickup. That’s the whole editorial philosophy in one sentence: chase the thing that affects people directly, don’t just chase the thing that’s trending.