Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A conversation with Steve Grove
A couple of weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, already one of the healthiest metro newspapers in the country, announced a thorough “reboot,” including a re-branding as the Minnesota Star Tribune. Late last month, I spoke with Steve Grove, the paper’s CEO and publisher since April of last year, about the thinking behind the moves.
Grove is a former state commissioner of Employment and Economic Development (under Gov. Tim Walz), and previously spent almost 12 years at YouTube and Google working on news products. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
And a shift to having three offers, where we usually just had for one, has helped us, we think, restate our value proposition from a pricing standpoint. The third of those is almost a donation, called Strib Supporter. We didn’t know how many people would take us up on it, but a significant number have, because they just want to help us out.
We also want to generate new sources of revenue. We’ve now launched a philanthropic effort, which, again, we’re not the first to do, but we’ve got some early momentum there. We launched sports betting and that didn’t actually go so well, because sports betting didn’t end up getting through the legislature like we thought it would. We’re looking into affiliated marketing. We’re looking into sponsored content. We’ve reshaped our events work.
There’s a functional factor at play, because of the fact that if we’re going to be the Minnesota Star Tribune, then how many races do you endorse in? Do you endorse the City Council of Mankato or Duluth? It starts to get bigger and more challenging. So the team put together a plan to look at various issue areas, rather than just a binary choice for elections. We’re still going to have our opinion journalism about the elections, but we’re going to give this a shot. If at the end of this election cycle, we’re like, gosh, that didn’t work, we can always go back to it.
I know endorsements are more valuable the further down the ballot you go. I, myself as a voter, don’t always know who I should vote for, for park board or dog catcher or whatever. I don’t mean to dismiss that, which is why you could go either way. But I think it’s time to try new things.
He has leaned forward at this moment when it’s needed. It’s been profitable for a long time, but the profit margins get smaller as print goes down, and so we just knew that managing decline was not the way.
Richard Tofel was founding general manager (and first employee) of ProPublica, and was its president from 2013 until January 2022. This post originally appeared on Second Rough Draft, his newsletter about journalism — subscribe here.