New Minnesota Monitor Fellows Broaden Local Coverage

Two prominent Twin Cities blogger-reporters have joined Minnesota Monitor as journalistic fellows, broadening and deeping the site’s coverage of state news: Sky Blue Waters‘ Tom Elko and Dan Haugen, publisher and editor of Northeast Beat, began reporting here November 1.

Elko has made a niche in Minnesota for investigative reporting on environmental issues, as well as creating the Minnesota Environmental News Wire, an aggregation of reports from more than 100 Minnesota-based news sources. A member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and recipient of a fellowship at Michigan State University’s Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute, he’ll be covering environmental issues at Minnesota Monitor as well as labor, state government agencies and technological innovation.

Haugen‘s journalistic focus has been intensely local — wherever he’s been. A staff writer at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, Iowa’s Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, and, most recently, Downtown/Southwest Journal in Minneapolis, he has covered beats from transportation and the environment to the arts and rural issues (in Cedar Falls he won an award for investigative reporting on water quality in the Cedar River). A podcaster and videoblogger, he’ll be doing multimedia reporting on greater Minnesota, transportation, and the environment.

Elko photo by Chuck Olsen

Earlier: Washington Post Veteran Hired as MNMON Parent’s Editorial Director