When Mukhtar Ibrahim left his role as CEO and publisher of Sahan Journal in October 2024, he didn’t imagine himself returning to journalism right away.  

Ibrahim—who founded the nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color in 2019—made the decision to step down to spend more time with family and advance his consulting career after obtaining his MBA from the Carlson School of Management. But bearing witness to a rise in anti-Somali media coverage and rhetoric drew him back in.  

“What we have seen over the last year or so really forced me to think about the role of journalism,” Ibrahim, a Somali American who came to Minnesota as an immigrant in 2005, says, pointing to a wave of social media videos and disparaging comments linked to right-wing politicians and media. “With so much noise and misinformation and the harmful narratives targeting my community, I just could not stay on the sidelines.” 

He aims to counter “discriminatory and harmful narratives and criticism” with the launch of The Somali Brief, a new media platform that reports on the people, ideas, and issues that form and shape Somali American life. It fills what Ibrahim identifies as a gap in mainstream coverage by giving the Somali American community journalism that reflects their lived experiences and inviting those outside the community to learn more about it. 

Ubah Ali will join Ibrahim as The Somali Brief’s lead reporter after spending three years at WCCO-TV, bringing several years of television and digital reporting experience to the role.  

“I had a lot of conversations with her and realized she’s been grappling with the same things that I’ve been grappling with: How can we tell the stories of our community?” says Ibrahim. “She feels a sense of obligation to do that instead of just covering things that might not move the needle.” 

Ibrahim hopes that having Ali on board will help the organization train others to produce content and “make sure that we have more people like us telling these stories.”  

Unlike Sahan Journal, which found success as a nonprofit operation, The Somali Brief is launching as a for-profit company (though Ibrahim is quick to mention that the journalism business generally isn’t the place to make a profit). URL Collective—a nonprofit founded in 2024 to support independent local newsrooms serving diverse audiences—is the organization’s fiscal sponsor, which they will use to pursue charitable grant funding. The blended for-profit model with a fiscal sponsor is becoming more popular in the media industry, with local players including the Star Tribune utilizing something similar. 

Ibrahim’s choice to build his second newsroom under a different financial model is less a ‘why’ and more a ‘why not?’ “We are hoping to innovate in this space,” he says. “I did the nonprofit model [with Sahan Journal], and now I want to see what the model [for The Somali Brief] will look like. It’s a way to experiment with a model which is widely used in the media space.” 

At launch, most of the outlet’s funding will be sourced from charitable foundations, however Ibrahim plans for The Somali Brief to generate revenue through advertising and sponsorships, events, and paid memberships. The organization also intends to form partnerships with other media outlets, content creators, and independent journalists to expand its audience and impact, with Somali TV Minnesota as its first media partner. 

Another difference between the two organizations: The Somali Brief is designed to be a “social-first platform.” In talking with family and friends during initial planning, Ibrahim said that he learned much of the community wasn’t reading the news published in major outlets and instead turned to social media to gather information. The multimedia approach, including video content and newsletter production, ensures that what his team produces reaches the people who need it. 

“If we have some reported stories that we need to take beyond those platforms, we will write them up and see who benefits from it,” he says, “but our strategy is to be on these platforms and produce content that is high quality, professional, and useful to [community members’] lives.” 

With statewide elections on the horizon, Ibrahim believes that the timing is especially apt as he sees political discourse spurring more hateful rhetoric against Somalis. Eight years after leaving his job at the Star Tribune to create Sahan Journal, he finds himself in a similar position of building something from the ground up. (Ibrahim also spent some of his early years as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, an early funder for Sahan Journal.) But, as was the case with his last media endeavor, he hopes that The Somali Brief can teach something to both himself and others. 

“I’m trying to pioneer this new model,” he says. “Hopefully the rest of the media will learn something from it, and before you know it, The Somali Brief will be a media outlet that everyone in the country knows about.”