TWIN CITIES MEDIA ALLIANCE

A donation in any amount qualifies you as a TCMA member. Benefits include advance notification and reduced ticket prices for Daily Planet events.

Top 10 Reasons to Support the Twin Cities Daily Planet:
10. Our award-winning journalism. Most recently, Daily Planet editor Mary Turck and report Molly Priesmeyer won a prestigious 2011 Premack Award for Excellence in coverage of breaking news about public affairs for their story “Who Pulled the Plug on University of Minnesota’s ‘Troubled Waters.’”

9. You have a home on the Daily Planet! Check out our new neighborhood pages for all 98 Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods - with interactive attractions maps, neighborhood news and events, a gallery of registered users who live in the neighborhood, and lots more.

8. We make your tax-deductible gift go a very long way. On our shoestring budget, every year we manage to cover hundreds of stories that are ignored or under-reported by the major local media outlets. And remember: Even a small gift helps us leverage grants from foundations, by demonstrating community support.

7. Our Brown Bag Lunch With A Journalist series. Your chance to get up close and personal with top Twin Cities' top newsmakers. Featured guests have included MPR reporter Laura Yuen, Star Tribune film critic Colin Covert, Pioneer Press tech columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata, and many more.

6. Our outstanding arts coverage. We cover the big events —like Art-a-Whirl and the Guthrie's Tony Kushner celebration—but we also provide invaluable coverage of the ethnic and community arts events that you may not read about in the mainstream media. Our award-winning Arts Orbit blog brings the best of the blogosphere straight to your inbox, and our weekly arts newsletter helps you find the best events for every single day of the year.

5. Our citizen journalism classes, media skills workshops and writers groups. Check www.tcdailyplanet.net/classes for details. More classes are coming in the fall.

4. Never miss another Daily Planet Happy Hour. Sign up as a member and you’ll be notified of all of our upcoming events, including our Daily Planet Happy Hours, our Brown Bag Lunch With a Journalist series and our Fall Media Forum (November 12.)

3. We reflect the tremendous diversity of our community. Where else can you find writers as diverse as Dwight Hobbes, Sheila Regan, Nekessa Opoti, Bryan Thao Worra and Lisa Gonzalez—and news stories from the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Mshale, Asian Pages, Hmong Today and the Minnesota Women’s Press—all under one masthead.

2. We’re people-powered journalism. Over the past year, we have published hundreds of stories by citizen journalists, and brought the voices and issues of neighborhood, ethnic and immigrant communities to a larger audience. Our editors and instructors have spent hundreds of hours teaching members of our community to use media tools to tell their own stories.

1. We aren’t just about journalism – we’re about change. We are trying to create the kind of news site that people from every segment of our community can use to share information, to deliberate, to collaborate, and to work together for a better community. And we can’t do it without you.

The Twin Cities Media Alliance offers classes, workshops and public forums that help people use the media to share information and build stronger neighborhoods and communities. Our award-winning local news website, the Twin Cities Daily Planet (www.tcdailyplanet.net) combines original reporting and commentary by citizen journalists with the best journalism from over 100 local neighborhood, community and ethnic newspapers, blogs and other media outlets.

A donation in any amount will be greatly appreciated. After you choose an amount, you can choose whether it will be a one-time donation, or a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual gift.

To view or download our 2010 Annual Report, please go to; http://www.scribd.com/doc/62938344/Annual-Report-Final-2010-online.