When I asked Aaron Brown to join the KAXE Morning Show with Kari Hedlund and me Thursday, Jan. 8, little did we know what the news from our state would be.
Between Gov. Tim Walz's announcement he would not seek a third term, a national spotlight on social services fraud cases and the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis, it was hard to focus on other topics.
We scheduled our weekly conversation with the KAXE Newsroom to air just before we talked to Aaron. Before taking a look back at the year in local news, News Director Chelsey Perkins guided us in thinking about our media consumption and intentionality of going to trusted sources as well as the amount of news consumed.
"We have this major story happening in our backyard and my gut instinct was to go to the sources I know and trust, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Minnesota Reformer, Sahan Journal and MinnPost. These are people who are there, they are people who have been covering these communities forever," Chelsey said.
Listen here to Chelsey's look back at 2025 and local stories of community and joy.
Aaron Brown joins us
When Aaron joined the conversation, he spoke of the idea of news as traumatizing and how there is a struggle to stay informed within an endless cycle of news and social media opinions or misinformation.
We are living in a different world.
"It was a world where the paper came in the morning, the news was on the TV in the evening," Aaron said of his childhood.
"Now, the news is almost like A Clockwork Orange. They're pumping it into us. And we choose to participate in social media and watch YouTube videos and then all the things that come with that."
This brings more trauma.
And the trauma, after the fact, becomes even more traumatic. "We have this kind of societal clash over what just happened," he said.
His advice? "Limit the chatter. Limit the repetition of seeing the news. You don't have to sit and watch 24-hour news all day."
Face-to-face interactions, community gathering places and a focus on local news can make a difference. But community gathering places and institutions like public libraries are at risk.
In his recent Minnesota Star Tribune column, Aaron documents the presence and impact of libraries throughout his life. From childhood to teenage years and life as a father of young children, libraries have loomed large and provided respite and a welcoming space.
"The library was a place where there's literally a portal to the bigger, outside world."
As the conversation continued, Aaron described libraries as a salve or a balm for how divided communities have become, especially now in the wake of Minnesota at the apex of worldwide news.
"The library is a place where we can spend indoor time together, maybe not talking to each other — though we could — but existing with each other."
Aaron said it can be easy to have feelings of hatred toward others when we're behind screens.
"It's really hard to look a person in the face and not see their humanity," he continued. "That's what we lack, and that's what the library can provide."
Listen to our full conversation above, including how Minnesota library funding is decreasing and what it means.
Have you changed the way you consume the news? Let us know!
