THE IDEA, IN BRIEF
What it is: The Somali Brief is an independent media platform telling the Somali American stories you won't find anywhere else.
Why now: As misinformation and hostility targeting Somalis continue to spread, the need for credible reporting has never been more urgent.
What's different: We built The Somali Brief around a simple question: What do you need to know — and how do we get that information to you? Those questions shape what we report, how we tell it, where our content appears, and who we partner with to extend its reach.
Who's behind it: Mukhtar Ibrahim, founder of Sahan Journal, with lead reporter Ubah Ali, formerly of WCCO, the CBS station in Minneapolis.
For most of my career, I have believed in the power of good reporting to change how people see each other.
I witnessed that power early. When I started working more than 10 years ago at Minnesota Public Radio and the Minnesota Star Tribune, I fell in love with the craft of reporting and writing. My stories about immigrants and Somalis often became the most-read on the website.
I also saw a gap. Readers wanted more of those stories — about achievement and education, culture and faith, business and belonging — but few reporters were telling them consistently. Too often, immigrant communities were missing from the coverage altogether, as if they didn't exist.
That gap led me to build a home for those stories. In 2019, I founded Sahan Journal and, within a few years, built it into one of the nation’s leading nonprofit newsrooms. What began as a one-person startup grew into a team of 23, including many young and immigrant journalists who shared my belief that our communities deserved fuller, more accurate coverage.
Two years ago, I stepped down from Sahan to see what lay beyond the walls of journalism. For the first time in a long time, I was living outside the daily rhythm of a newsroom.
That distance changed how I thought about journalism and how information reaches people. But what brings me back now is what my community lived through this past year.
Watching an intense, highly coordinated misinformation campaign targeting Somalis spread rapidly, and shape how millions of people saw us, made the need for a different kind of media outlet impossible to ignore.
So I am building one.
The Somali Brief is an independent media platform telling the Somali American stories you won't find anywhere else. We produce original reporting that meets people where they are — on social platforms, in their inboxes, and in live conversation.
I'm building this with one of the best reporters I know, Ubah Ali, formerly of WCCO — you'll be hearing a lot from her.
To understand why I’m building The Somali Brief this way, it helps to understand what I saw when I stepped away from the newsroom.
Inside a newsroom, you spend your days surrounded by colleagues who share many of the same assumptions, routines, and instincts about how journalism is done. It can be difficult to step back and see how much the world around journalism has changed, even as the industry itself has been slower to adapt.
Today, a creator with a phone and a social media account can reach more people in an afternoon than many newsrooms reach in a month.
Once I stepped away, I started paying closer attention to how information actually moves. Where do people find their news? Who do they trust? Why are our feeds filled with the most inflammatory claims instead of the most informative ones? And how can we change that trend — for ourselves and for our community?
The journalism I’d been taught to create was not built to answer those questions. Report the story, publish it, post it on the newsroom's accounts, and trust that it will reach the people who need it. That approach no longer matches how most people get their information.
Then, in late 2025, this observation stopped being a professional question. It became personal.
A flood of false, misleading, and sweeping claims washed over my own community. The pattern was simple, yet sophisticated. A claim would surface from a content creator, get picked up by influencers with large followings, and reach millions of readers and viewers within a day. President Donald Trump and powerful figures around him would repeat it in speeches and posts, while Elon Musk and media personalities pushed it further still. By the time anyone checked it, the claim was already national.
It felt like an algorithmic lynching. No one had to organize the mob; the feeds did it for them. Almost overnight, "Somali" became a word the whole world was hearing.
You know what followed. The federal government launched the largest immigration crackdown in the country's history, and Minnesota was its target. Federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis. Across Minnesota, immigrant families lived in fear, and daily life became a struggle.
I watched a false story about my community become a national narrative, and then watched that narrative become federal policy on our streets.
That experience changed what I believe journalism must do. A story can be accurate, important, and carefully reported, and still arrive after the world's attention has moved on. It can reach too few people to make a difference.
For journalism to matter, it needs to be visible, accessible, and relevant enough to earn a place in people's daily lives.
A place to turn
As Somali Americans became the subject of a hostile national conversation, I was stunned to realize there was no professional media platform dedicated exclusively to telling Somali American stories to a wider audience.
Millions of Americans were encountering racist and dehumanizing content about Somalis. Where could they go for credible reporting? And where could Somali Americans find journalism that treated the full range of their lives—schools and businesses, arts and faith, politics and public service, joy and struggle—as worthy of sustained attention?
Those questions have never been more urgent. The Somali Brief will fill that space.
We are also building The Somali Brief differently from the newsrooms I have known. We think about distribution from the beginning, not after the reporting is finished. That means producing work that informs people and reaches them where they already are. It means investing in video, multimedia, podcasts, and storytelling designed for each platform. And it means working with independent journalists, creators, and community organizations to help reliable information travel farther.
Producing exceptional journalism will be at the center of our work. But we will be more ambitious about helping strong journalism reach the people it is meant to serve.
We're just getting started
We are starting with a small team and a big ambition. Ubah brings years of television and multimedia reporting experience, a deep understanding of Somali American life, and the kind of curiosity and storytelling instinct we want at the center of this work.
As we grow, we hope to bring in more journalists, creators, and voices who can help us report more deeply and reach people we could never reach on our own.
If you believe Somali American stories deserve rigorous reporting, wider reach, and room for complexity, join us at the beginning: subscribe for updates, follow The Somali Brief on social media, and share our work with someone who should know us.
That is how this works: our reporting travels as far as you carry it.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. That already puts you ahead of most of the internet, and it tells me you may be exactly the kind of reader we are building this for.
The full story starts here.