By Ellen Clegg
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times shocked readers, staff and political observers when their billionaire owners killed editorial endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris, overruling their own editorial boards. But this astonishing season of non-endorsements also saw a third instance — at a well-respected 157-year-old newspaper owned by a billionaire — that didn’t quite achieve the same viral liftoff. Although that policy change, at The Minnesota Star Tribune, happened last summer, events reached a boiling point in late October.
The Star Tribune, which I profiled in our book, “What Works in Community News,” has a newish publisher and CEO, former Silicon Valley executive Steve Grove, and an even newer opinion editor, Phillip Morris, an award-winning journalist from Ohio. In August, a month after Morris started, he announced a comprehensive overhaul of the opinion pages, which had routinely featured one or more editorials as well as bylined guest essays and letters to the editor.
Morris certainly came in hot. He explained that the Strib, as the paper is known locally, would no longer write endorsements for candidates or ballot questions. Instead, the paper launched Strib Voices, a new platform featuring bylined commentary from across Minnesota.
Voices features 11 columnists with a wide range of views, and, as Morris wrote recently, aimed to “seek out, curate and elevate voices from all across the political, geographic and demographic spectrum.” Instead of endorsements, the editorial board would analyze candidates’ positions on key issues. The institutional voice urging a vote for a specific candidate would be rare. Or, in this particular case, nonexistent.
Although the editorial board weighed in with a stern editorial (gift link) on Donald Trump’s racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim rally at Madison Square Garden, it made no endorsement in the presidential election. And although Morris promised “studied analysis” of issues in congressional races, the coverage (gift link) thus far has seemed cursory.
Last week, 15 former Strib opinion staffers jumped into the breach, posting “The endorsement editorial the Star Tribune should have published” on a microblogging platform endorsing Harris. The authors — including two retired editorial page editors, prominent columnists and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist — submitted their commentary to the Star Tribune, which declined to publish it in full. As they wrote in their introduction:
Fifteen of us — most of whom used to research, interview, debate, write and edit political endorsements and the counterpoint letters and commentary that followed — wrote the following and submitted it as a commentary to the Star Tribune this week.
We aimed to do what the newspaper we care deeply about had decided not to do. We wrote the editorial that we think the paper should have published Oct. 27. We added an introduction that explained why we think endorsements are important. The Star Tribune declined to publish our full submission, offering only to print the introduction as a letter to the editor, which we declined.
In support of free speech, press freedom and robust public debate on critical issues of the day, we’re now sharing what we wrote via other means.
The authors also explained their thinking about the role of endorsements in the civic life of a community and a nation. “Some executives have justified their decisions by saying a version of the following: It’s not up to us to tell readers how to vote. That’s a stunningly uninformed view. We have never told readers what to think or how to vote. What we have done is share our thoughts and our values on the issues of the day. We did this because we care deeply about our communities and our nation. We wrote endorsement editorials to demonstrate our deep investment in those communities and in that nation.”
Full disclosure: I interviewed two of the signers, former editorial page editor Susan Albright and columnist Lori Studevant, for the book, and I periodically talked with editorial page editor Scott Gillespie when I was editorial page editor of The Boston Globe.
In a recent note (gift link) to readers, opinion editor Morris writes that he remains confident in the decision to “pause” endorsements, but then hints that reaction has been mixed. “We heard from you in the aftermath; some really liked the approach; others labeled it a retrenchment from civic duty, and still others have adopted a wait-and-see approach,” he wrote. He offers a coda that seems apt to madden readers who wanted to see an endorsement in one of the most consequential presidential elections in history.
“After Nov. 5 has passed,” he writes, “we intend to continue public conversations already under way about how we best serve our loyal readers and grow new audiences throughout the entire state of Minnesota. The editorial endorsement construct remains a tool that may still offer value, especially in state and local races.”
Say what? Morris has yet to disclose who was involved in the non-endorsement decision. What was the role of billionaire owner Glen Taylor? What was Grove’s role?
Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri’s journalism school, posted a trenchant take on the value of editorial endorsements on Threads, and then on his updated blog. (Our interview with Damon on our “What Works” podcast can be found here.) “There are arguments to be made about the surplus of opinion-driven content online, and the confusion this can cause readers encountering an op-ed or column in its atomized form on the socials,” he writes. “Those issues can be fairly addressed and mitigated. But shouldn’t local news organizations be focused on doing what is right, rather than what is expedient? Or, shouldn’t our first question be: what is the role of journalism in supporting civic health?”
In other news from the North Star State, publisher Grove announced that he signed a contract with Simon & Schuster for a book due to be published in June 2025 entitled “How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir.” The publisher’s blurb describes the book thusly: “A Minnesota native son shares an urgent invitation to rediscover the grounding power of community through his story of leaving life in Silicon Valley to return to the Midwest.”
The news about Grove, who was part of Gov. Tim Walz’s cabinet (gift link) before taking the top job at the Strib, has produced some skepticism in his newsroom, according to the alternative digital site Racket and the Minnesota Reformer, a politics-focused outlet that is part of the nonprofit States Newsroom. Anonymous sources told the Reformer’s Patrick Coolican that top bosses at the paper were “blindsided by the news, which could require decisions about how to deal with any Walz news nuggets that might appear in the tome.”
It takes a little chutzpah to write a memoir at the tender age of 47, but Grove has an opportunity to provide a few answers, along with insight on how he thinks about his role as publisher and how he’ll help shape the future of the Star Tribune, which remains a vital voice in Flyover America. Let’s hope that along with chapters about “reinvention, love, community, and what holds us together,” he explains how he’ll stand up to powerful people who would prefer that the independent press heed their whims, and to the dark forces that want to extinguish it altogether.
