We launched Southwest Voices back in 2021. Since then, we’ve been working to try to help make Minneapolis a little bit better every day. 

But the organization in its current form is not sustainable. No, this isn’t the end of the road, but it is time to reset and transition. Unfortunately, that means we have to part ways with two people that made us who we are today, Melody Hoffmann and Brianna Kelly. This is incredibly difficult for us to do, but we are in a position where we had no other choice.

These things that we built aren’t going away. Our newsletters – Southwest Voices, Downtown Voices, and our Friday citywide Minneapolis Weekly – will continue, though our cadence might be reduced (we’re still working out the exact details). We’ll keep our website and social media channels active and look to share stories that matter to our community (if you have something you want to get out there, email us at info@southwestvoices.news). 

But before that, I want to recognize our team. Simply put, there would be no Southwest Voices without Melody and no Downtown Voices without Brianna. They are incredibly talented journalists that helped us build a wonderful community and cover some of the most important issues our city faces every day. 

Melody joined us in late 2021 as our first full-time employee and the Founding Editor of Southwest Voices. Thousands of conversations with our readers later, she has cultivated a community around our publication that’s truly special, launched the most fun weather reports in town, and led our team through it all with incredible passion and care for our city. She pioneered a new approach to hyperlocal news in our city that married the optimism of neighborhood papers with the dynamism of the internet. She approached the work with humility, humor, and most of all, a desire to bring people together. 

Brianna joined us for the launch of Downtown Voices in 2023, taking a leap to join our team and cover an area of the city that needed more people to pull for it and work to build community. She is a dogged reporter and a great writer. Brianna’s tireless efforts to tell the stories of people working to make the greater downtown area a better place made a real difference. In a media landscape where the vast majority of reporting about the center of the city was about downtown for people that weren’t downtown, she reported for downtown and the people that live, work, and play there. 

Both Melody and Brianna would make a tremendous addition to any newsroom. Minneapolis is lucky to have them both. They are truly journalists built for the media environment of 2025 and beyond, capable of telling stories across several mediums and able to play about a dozen different roles in a typical newsroom structure. In fact, in our next form, our hope is to be able to continue our work with both of them.

Why didn’t it work out in a different way this time? Early on, Minneapolis Voices got about a third of our funding from membership, a third of our funding from advertising, and a third of our funding from grants. Our membership is actively growing, but our grant funding has declined as our team has grown, and our advertising has plateaued. I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to mention the dozens of potential advertisers that told us they didn’t have money because their budgets were being spent on social media platforms that suck resources out of our community and leave nothing behind. While we have made it almost four years, we tried really hard to make it work but couldn’t quite get there as a standalone entity. We absolutely have a future as a part of a larger operation, and I think we could’ve made it work with smaller ambitions, but right now it feels like we’re stuck in the middle.

We exist in a much broader context than just Minneapolis. In the first half of this year, local businesses have been feeling the pain of a wobbly global economy and chaotic tariff policies that are driving up costs and uncertainty for everyone, while at the same time numerous community organizations have seen grants cancelled and funding pulled by the federal government or entities that they have funded. The resulting pullback has hit our bottom line. Locally-owned businesses and organizations in our community are hurting, we hurt along with them, and they deserve your support if you are able.

There’s a very obvious need for something like Minneapolis Voices and our publications to exist. Our city is in need of more civic virtue and shared spaces. We need things that bring us together, that lift up the people taking a chance on making this a better place, and that starts every day by listening to people and using their thoughts and their voices to help build something bigger than any of us can create alone. The city is desperate for more people to cover what’s going on here with a curious eye and an empathetic heart. News about Minneapolis that’s made for the people of Minneapolis matters now more than ever. 

There is a very rich regional news environment in the Twin Cities. There are organizations like North News, KRSM, Longfellow Whatever, and Wedge Live doing great work at the local level. Our other partners in the Twin Cities Media Group, Racket, Heavy Table, and New Prensa have been on similar journeys doing fun, impactful things every week. But the fact is there are fewer resources being spent on covering Minneapolis than there have been in decades, including City Hall, the Park Board, our schools, the county board, and beyond.

Which brings me to what’s next. We believe the best way to make Minneapolis Voices, and all the coverage you love from Southwest Voices, Downtown Voices, and Minneapolis Schools Voices work is as part of a larger family of publications. We’ve been in active conversations with potential partners over the past several weeks about a potential merger or acquisition, but we could not get it done in time to keep our team together. 

We have a couple things in the works, and if we haven’t already discussed it, and you’re interested in talking about the future of Minneapolis Voices, get in touch soon by email at charlie@southwestvoices.news. We look forward to keeping the lights on and keeping in touch until then.