The room is small on purpose. The Best Buy Theater sits on the fourth floor of Northrop Auditorium, tucked beneath the uppermost balcony of the University of Minnesota's 1929 landmark, with seats for 168 people and two lobbies connected by the Northrop Gallery. It was built for lectures, small ensembles, film screenings and panel discussions — the kind of space where a speaker can see every face in the audience and every listener can hear a question asked without a microphone.
On Monday, Oct. 26, at 4:30 p.m., that room will hold a conversation about what it means for journalists to bear witness — to be present at the events that shape the country, to report what they see, and then to persuade readers that the account is trustworthy. The panel brings together three New York Times journalists and the top editor of the Minnesota Star Tribune. Admission is free, though Northrop asks attendees to register in advance.
Patrick Healy, an assistant managing editor at the Times, will be one of them. His title — standards and trust — is a relatively new one at the paper, and it describes a job that did not exist in quite this form a generation ago. When the Times announced his appointment to the newsroom masthead, the note from editors Joe Kahn, Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan framed the role as a response to a changed information environment: deep reporting and expert storytelling still find wide audiences, they wrote, but the paper can reach more people and combat misinformation when it is clear and transparent about the range, rigor and intent of its reporting and about the people who produce it. Healy's assignment was to develop new ways to help the public understand journalistic process and decisions — why a story was covered, what went into the reporting, how the thorniest editorial questions were handled — in text, video, audio and newsletters, and beyond the paper's own platforms. Before that, Healy was a political correspondent and editor at the Times, and he has written for The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other outlets.
Ernesto Londoño comes to the panel from the other end of the reporting chain. A national desk correspondent based in Minnesota, he covers news across the Midwest as well as drug use and counternarcotics policy. He joined the Times in 2014 as an editorial writer focused on foreign policy, then spent years as the paper's Brazil bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro. Before the Times he worked at The Washington Post, where his assignments included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the Pentagon. Born and raised in Bogotá during a period of armed conflict and political turbulence fueled by the war on drugs, he moved to the United States for college in 1999 and has since lived in Miami, Dallas, Washington, Baghdad, Cairo, New York and Rio. In early 2022 he settled in Saint Paul, in a quiet neighborhood near the Mississippi River, with his husband and a Brazilian rescue dog named Hugo. He is also the author of "Trippy," a book blending memoir and reportage about medicinal psychedelics — a subject that grew out of an episode of depression during his years in Brazil.
David Guttenfelder, a visual journalist, represents a third way of witnessing. His work has long been associated with images made in places that are difficult to reach and harder to photograph, and the presence of a photographer on a panel about credibility is a reminder that trust is not only a matter of words. A photograph can be the most direct form of testimony a news organization offers, and also the easiest to doubt in an era of synthetic imagery.
Kathleen Hennessey, editor and senior vice president of the Minnesota Star Tribune, rounds out the group. Her presence makes the discussion explicitly local as well as national: the question of how a newsroom earns trust is not abstract in a state with its own strong newspaper tradition, and the comparison between a national paper's trust apparatus and a regional daily's relationship with its readers is likely to be one of the more interesting threads of the hour.
The setting carries its own weight. Northrop — formally Cyrus Northrop Memorial Auditorium, named for the university's second president — was built between 1928 and 1929 as part of a major university expansion and opened on Oct. 22, 1929. For decades it was a cavernous, 4,847-seat shoebox of a hall that hosted the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, the university's marching band, commencements and lectures; the Grateful Dead played there in October 1971. After an exterior restoration in 2006, the building closed from 2011 to 2014 for an $88.2 million interior rebuild designed by HGA, which gutted nearly everything behind the three-story Memorial Hall lobby and replaced the old two-level configuration with a four-level, horseshoe-shaped auditorium, shedding 2,147 seats. The result, which reopened in April 2014, seats 2,692 and puts the audience closer to the stage. The Best Buy Theater was created in that renovation as an intimate fourth-floor venue, equipped with film projection and a listening system that lets the room itself be tuned to the sound being produced.
The event is part of UMN Conversations at Northrop, a series that gathers lectures, panel discussions and talks presented by various university departments under a single banner so they are easier to find and follow from fall through spring. The series is announced twice a year, in step with the university's semester calendars, and events are added as they are finalized. It has drawn prominent speakers in the past — the fall calendar alone includes a Distinguished Carlson Lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin in early November — and it has also been the stage for controversy, as when a planned lecture by Dr. Anthony Fauci was canceled amid the occupation of a campus building.
What the panel will actually say is not scripted in advance. But the framing offered by Northrop is pointed: the journalists will discuss and debate what it takes to bear witness to the events that shape the country, and how they do so while earning reader trust. Those two halves of the sentence are not always comfortable together. Witnessing can mean being in a place when it is dangerous, or when the people there would rather not be seen; earning trust can mean explaining, afterward, why the newsroom made the choices it did — what it published, what it withheld, and who decided. Healy's team exists to answer those questions in public. Londoño's work puts him in the position of generating them. Guttenfelder's images raise them wordlessly. And Hennessey's newspaper answers them to readers who can cancel a subscription with a click.
For anyone who has wondered how the sausage of credibility gets made — or who simply wants to hear four working journalists argue about it in a 168-seat room — the hour is free and open. Northrop asks that attendees register ahead of time through its events page. The theater is on the fourth floor of the auditorium at 84 Church Street SE on the university's East Bank campus in Minneapolis.