Today Sahan Journal launches Meet Your Mayor, an interactive quiz that allows users to discover which mayoral candidates best match with their views.
Meet Your Mayor includes quizzes for mayoral races in Minneapolis and St. Paul. We started by presenting a list of public-minded questions to all five St. Paul mayoral candidates and six of the leading candidates in Minneapolis.
We asked the candidates to explain where they stand on key issues in each city: topics like whether Minneapolis should adopt police reform policies in the city’s abandoned federal consent decree, whether the St. Paul rent-control ordinance should be further amended, and what to do about the dwindling tax base in both downtowns.
When readers visit Sahan’s Meet Your Mayor sites, they’ll have the opportunity to take the same quiz each candidate took. Afterward, the results will show readers the three candidates whose answers aligned most closely with their own.
Both Minneapolis and St. Paul’s mayoral races will use ranked-choice elections. We hope our quiz will help readers decide how to rank their top three candidates.
Sahan’s director of editorial, Chao Xiong, embraced this interactive election tool as a way to connect with a wider range of voters. “Sahan has published voters’ guides before,” Xiong said. “But we’re always looking for new and dynamic ways to engage readers. The quiz requires participation that hopefully encourages readers to think more actively about what matters to them this election.”
Identifying that need led Sahan to a collaboration with the American Journalism Project, a venture philanthropy organization dedicated to local news. A similar Meet Your Mayor election quiz debuted at The City, a nonprofit newsroom in New York. In August, AJP offered Sahan Journal the opportunity to pilot the quiz format to engage and inform voters in the Twin Cities.
The quiz’s original developer, Sam Rabiyah, helped adapt the interactive tool. One major change: It needed to address not just a different set of public issues but two separate cities.
“Meet Your Mayor shows the power of thinking outside the box and how you can be innovative in service journalism,” said Rabiyah, who visited Sahan in September to help build out the quiz. “It’s a great model for any newsroom to experiment with nontraditional forms of media.”
Meet Your Mayor is also a part of Sahan Journal’s efforts to experiment with new formats and engage with its audience in new ways, all while advancing community and civic engagement in the Twin Cities.
Please jump over to the Minneapolis or St. Paul quiz and discover how the candidates match up with your own stances and political values. We hope you’ll like this new effort, and please contact us with any questions, suggestions and feedback on this project at contact@sahanjournal.com.
