Rebooting the Minnesota Star Tribune: A Conversation with Steve Grove

From paper of record to paper of relevancy

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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.

RT: So, Steve, you announced five focus areas for your coverage: news and politics, business, outdoors and the environment, food and culture, and sports. In doing that, what were the hardest choices you made, and what are you foregoing?

SG: We looked at what types of content people read the most often on our pages, but then we also looked at where the audience data showed us we had the best chance of growing an audience of paid subscribers. Some of them are obvious: news and politics, sports, food and culture. The outdoors we felt were somewhat unique to this market, part of the Minnesota culture and identity.

You could have seen lifting up such topics as education. Certainly science and health; we're a med tech capital. But I'll tell you this: If in a year we realize that we made the wrong choices, we'll just change. We'd have to.

RT: What are you likely to de-emphasize in your coverage?

SG: I think we're going to de-emphasize [certain aspects of] culture. We still had people writing TV reviews or book reviews that didn't have any real rooting in our state. Those just feel like things that you could get elsewhere. Personal finance is another one. We had a business section that spent a lot of time doing the kinds of things that WalletHub would do. And that's not criticism against our business section, which has done some tremendous work, but there's a gap in covering, say, the innovation economy in Minnesota, which is quite interesting and unique and differentiating.

Meet us at the Fair

RT: You announced a lot of reboots at once-- a new brand and tagline, new website, new app, new opinion platform. Why did you decide to debut all of that at once rather than rolling things out over time?

SG: We did roll out a lot of things over time in the last year, but it did certainly culminate in this moment when we relaunched. Part of it was Minnesota. There's this thing called the State Fair, and it's just a really, really big deal, and it's happening right now. And while you wouldn't usually see a marketing launch in the sleepy days of August, we knew that launching at the State Fair was going to give us a huge opportunity to talk to people about what we're doing.

Steve Grove

Our theory of the case was, if you're going to try to stick your head up and get some attention, if you're going to try to make noise in a market that is very crowded, then the more you can pack into one punch, the more people are going to feel the impact of what you're trying to do.

We also want to be very careful not to convey that this is a marketing exercise. It certainly is to some degree. I'm not going to shy away from that. But it's not just like, hey, we put a fancier logo at the top of our website. We actually put some substance behind this idea that we can be the Minnesota Star Tribune.

RT: The editorial and brand changes received the most attention, but there were also business side changes. Can you talk about the most important of those in your view?

SG: Probably the biggest shift was our product itself. We rebooted our entire digital platform and our app. Rather than come in and say we need to tweak this or tweak that, we just said, “Let's start over.” Even under the hood, we have a new CMS-- we're working with Arc-- and an entirely new consumer growth funnel with Piano.

That’s the product shift. On the business side, first, a new approach to subscriptions in general. We hadn't really made a meaningful digital sprint in a while. The offer of one dollar for six months is a pretty big deal. We're not the first, but that's a pretty big sampling market to go after.

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.

RT: What kinds of results, if you're willing to say, have you seen so far on the philanthropic side?

SG: Nothing to announce yet, but some early momentum. But watch this space, because in October we're going to kick off a bigger campaign. We didn't want philanthropy to be the big message upon relaunch. We wanted the subscription message to reign supreme. But with Fall giving season coming up in Minnesota, being a state with a ton of charitable and philanthropic energy, we're going to lean in heavily there.

Embracing a nickname

RT: People in the Twin Cities have long called you all the Strib, and you used to officially discourage this, but you've now turned toward encouraging it. Can you walk me through the changing thinking on that?

SG: It's this wonderful nickname that the people gave us. To me, it symbolizes that we want to be the news organization of the people of Minnesota. If we aren't willing to receive a nickname they had given us, then I feel like it just defines us as still part of this ivory tower, this media elite that's not listening to people.

One of the big things we've tried to convey at the Star Tribune is you want to be out in the community more. We've already done two statewide tours since I started to just go out and talk to folks. None of this is revolutionary. But it conveys a different kind of relationship to your audience.

I feel like in news, for the past 10 or 15 years, we've ceded a lot of the audience connection to the social platforms. I think you've seen that reflected in the declining trust in media more broadly. So by adopting the nickname and actually using it in certain cases, like Strib Voices or the Strib Store, I think it just shows, hey, we get it. We even have a mascot now. We call him Stribby; he's this little gray duck. We're trying to be [occasionally] lighthearted. I think news can be awfully serious, and sometimes the news is serious and it needs to be, but sometimes we can lift up some joy and have some fun with it too.

Becoming a “paper of relevancy”

RT: How will you know if all this has been successful?

SG: We've been around for 137 years. We want to be around for a lot longer. We've got to have a model that sustains a newsroom that can do the kind of work that we have the ambition to do, and that takes money. So we're looking to significantly increase our digital subscriptions. We've kind of hovered around 100k for a while. We think we can more than double that.

Number two, we would like to see at least 25% of our P&L look different in a couple of years than it does now. That just means entirely new sources of revenue. That's a tall order, but I don't think any media company right now can just be banking on subscriptions to save the day.

Then, are people talking about us? Are we relevant? We're trying to move from a place of being the paper of record to the paper of relevancy. Where can we tell stories that aren't being told? Where can we drive conversations?

We have a VP of brand and comms for the first time who’s heavily focused on proactively pushing our work out there, getting our columnists and journalists more attention and awareness, and being willing to tell our story. I think in news organizations, you can't afford not to talk about what you're doing with your audience more, or they're gonna be like, “Isn't that wonderful, but I'm not gonna pay for it.”

RT: You've said that you're experimenting with ending editorial political endorsements. Can you say why?

SG: It's an experiment. I became convinced after talking to over a dozen opinion leaders across the country that there is simply no right answer to this question. You could go either way, but you have seen a broader trend [away from endorsements], and I think it's because of the fact that you want to appeal to a bigger audience. If you're bringing it down to a binary decision, when it comes to an election, it's harder to do that.

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.

RT: Your owner, Glen Taylor, is making a significant although unspecified investment to do all of this. Is he expecting an economic return on that investment, or is this now more of a civic commitment?

SG: Glen purchased the paper in 2014 and has never once taken a penny from it, nor does he plan to. So this is not, in his mind, a business from which he personally wants to profit. He sees this as part of his legacy as a Minnesotan who's had an enormous impact on our state. He's also a very smart businessman and he wants to build and deliver successful businesses to the state. So he wants it to be a profitable business.

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.

RT: Just to clarify, you said he's never taken money out. But is money being put in, or is it just the investment of the accumulated surplus? Is it actually an injection of new money?

SG: Yes.

RT: Steve, that's pretty much all I have. Is there anything else you would like to say?

SG: I would just add that there's a lot of amazing people in this industry trying things. We know we're not the only ones trying something new, but I hope that what we're doing can create something of a model that can be replicated elsewhere. We learn a lot from other markets; we've copied a lot from others. Hopefully there's something to copy from us. We really feel like it's a moment to reimagine the space, and we're lucky to get to do it here.

RT: Thank you.