By Ellen Clegg
When former Google executive Steve Grove was named CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis last April, expectations were understandably high.
His predecessor, Michael Klingensmith, who retired in January 2023, led a remarkable turnaround during his 13 years in the job. Klingensmith, a Minnesota native who had a storied career at Time Inc., was named publisher of the year by Editor & Publisher and notched three Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure — including the 2021 prize for breaking news reporting for the paper’s “urgent, authoritative and nuanced coverage” of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020.
Grove initially faced some tough coverage from Racket, an alternative digital outlet. (Our interview with Racket editor and co-founder Em Cassel can be found here.) But he seems to be settling in and feeling Minnesota. After a summer spent shadowing reporters and traveling the state on a listening tour — including a stint at a booth at the renowned Minnesota State Fair — Grove announced his first big strategic move this month: the Star Tribune is expanding, staking a claim to news coverage in communities throughout the North Star State, from the Iron Range along Lake Superior in the north to Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, in the southeast.
In a press release published in Editor & Publisher, Grove announced: “At a time when many news organizations are contracting, we are making significant resource investments to ensure the voices of communities around our great state are represented.”
The Star Tribune bills itself as the largest news organization in the Midwest, a bold claim that is likely true in an era of the Gannett-driven collapse of regional and local newsrooms. As we’ve written in our book, “What Works in Community News,” which was released Jan. 9, the Star Tribune newsroom stood at 235 journalists when we interviewed editor Suki Dardarian in June 2022. The Strib, as the paper is known locally, serves Minneapolis, a city of nearly 430,000 people, and a larger metropolitan area of nearly 3 million. While that staffing level represents a 37% decline from 2007, when the newsroom stood at 375, it is comparable in size to that of The Boston Globe, which serves a city of 675,000 and a metropolitan area of more than 4 million people.
During my reporting forays back to Minneapolis for the book (full disclosure: I grew up in a suburb near the city, was a summer intern at the morning Minneapolis Tribune and spent some quality time at the University of Minnesota), a source told me that the Strib remains bullish on print circulation because there are engaged readers in many of the state’s 87 counties who get a copy delivered.
The Star Tribune was one of the original newsrooms selected to be part of the Table Stakes program, an initiative underwritten by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund and the Knight Foundation that guides newsrooms in thinking strategically about digital transformation and audience engagement.
In an interview for the book, editor and senior vice president Suki Dardarian told me, “That program has continued to serve us in all its iterations. We even have a few people who are doing another Table Stakes project now. It really helped unite us around the company — and in the industry — with others who were trying to innovate and change and find ways to move forward.”
She said that working across news platforms collaboratively remains a crucial goal, but so does adapting for a diverse readership and engaging with the audience, which will entail better hiring, diversity audits and attention to hiring pipelines. In the end, she observed, “It’s all audience-driven. It’s where we have been headed, and where we are headed.”
And the expansion plans are nothing if not ambitious. The newsroom has posted jobs for reporters in north central and southwest Minnesota and is expanding existing teams in communities outside the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Back in the downtown Minneapolis office, the Strib is launching a “Today Desk” to track breaking news online and beefing up that reporting team. Grove is also in the market for a greater Minnesota columnist to roam the state’s rural communities and report on trends — the kind of coverage that has been harder for small nonprofit media startups to sustain.
Decades back, roving Strib columnist Jim Klobuchar, who hailed from the Iron Range, captured the life and times of Minnesota with vivid writing and reporting, making him something of a local legend. Klobuchar’s career sparked an appreciation for the travails of the ink-stained wretch in his daughter, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Klobuchar sponsored the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which, although far from perfect, would allow news organizations both large and samll to band together to negotiate terms with platforms like Google and Facebook.
I’m sure she’ll be watching the Strib’s bold expansion —and reading — with interest.
What Works 