Suki Dardarian became the big boss of the Strib in 2022 when Rene Sanchez decamped to New Orleans. (She had been managing editor for eight years.) It’s a desirable job—the Minneapolis-based Strib is one of the more stable, well-resourced papers in a troubled media landscape. She sees traditional media as a beacon in an era of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies, but she admits the public is increasingly skeptical of all content. Her agenda includes beefed-up outstate coverage, as well as public service, environmental, and investigative journalism. She says she’s sensitive to a critique that newspapers have recently traded an establishment bias for a leftist one, and she believes in auditing coverage to address framing and sourcing. To the idea that people are simply worn down by too much news and rampant doomscrolling, she says, “The psyche of the community is important. We need to identify solutions as well as problems.”

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