Welcome to Iron Range Today, an independent, digital news service covering the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota, where we provide free reporting from across the region, along with a few musings on the family along the way.

We are excited to welcome you to our website, which is you’re just catching up, launched Nov. 1, 2022.

We are Jerry Burnes and Leah Ryan. Neither of us are new to reporting on Iron Range news and you may recognize our names from the Mesabi Tribune (which were once separate papers, the Mesabi Daily News and Hibbing Daily Tribune), where for many years Jerry was the editor and Leah a reporter. Since leaving the newspaper, we’ve both heard from community members that more reporting was needed in the region, and they missed the family’s occasional ridiculous shenanigans divulged in Leah’s personal columns. 

Iron Range Today was started to fill that need. The community expressed a need and we are here to fill it for you, our community and our family. 

At Iron Range Today, you’ll find new stories at least once a week — twice around the Nov. 8 election — as we build the site and our sources back up, with a newsletter you can sign up for to have stories delivered right to your inbox. We also have plans for podcasting and much more. 

And it’s all free to read: No subscriptions and no paywalls. If you end up liking what we’re doing and want to support us, we’ll have a mechanism in place to do that soon. 

The Iron Range Today team welcomes you to reach out with news tips, story ideas and general feedback. Keep in mind the staff consists of just Jerry and Leah, so we can’t cover everything, but we want to hear about the important issues in your community, the fun stories that highlight our region and its culture and the important questions and topics that need to be explored further through deeper reporting.

We are here to make our community a better place. A community can only thrive if it is well informed, and we all need our community to thrive to support our families. 

For more on Iron Range Today, visit our About page, or check out a write up on us in the Star Tribune. 

Thanks for reading and hope to hear from you soon! – Leah and Jerry