In the inaugural episode of the Medill State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Steve Grove, CEO and publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
They discuss Grove’s unconventional journey from Google executive to leading one of the nation’s largest regional newsrooms, the Star Tribune’s approach to rebuilding trust during Operation Metro Surge and how AI, shifting audience habits, and declining digital traffic are reshaping the local news industry.
This Q&A transcript captures their conversation on innovation, strategy and the future of local journalism.
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Tim Franklin Hello everyone and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Medill State of Local News podcast. It's great to have you with us. I'm your host, Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, home of the Medill Local News Initiative. Medill will be bringing this podcast to you every month, most of the time from the state-of-the-art broadcast studio here on our Evanston campus, located outside Chicago. So why does the world need another podcast? Well, we're all living through a historic transformation in media and in local news and how people consume it and in how it's produced, and importantly, and how it's paid for. So my goal with this podcast is to help you make sense of the mind bending changes in the industry, whether you're involved in local media or just interested in it. Every month we'll be joined by news executives, innovators, thought leaders, policymakers, and philanthropists.
And I'm confident that you'll find these conversations to be insightful, inspirational, and filled with ideas that can help you better understand the state of local news in America. And I also hope we have a little fun along the way. And that's the goal with this morning's conversation. Our first guest is someone who embodies reinvention. Steve Grove is the CEO and publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, commonly known as The Strib, one of America's best regional news organizations. Steve, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove It's great to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Oh, you bet. So Steve, I'd like to cover three things with you today in the time that we have. First, I'd like to talk to you about your kind of quixotic personal journey to running the Star Tribune. Second, let's talk about Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and the Star Tribune's role in covering that event, which became huge national news, as we all know. And finally, I'd like to talk to you about the trends that you see affecting local news these days and what you're doing at the Star Tribune to transform your own organization. But let's start with your own kind of fascinating personal journey of reinvention. I think our listeners and viewers need to understand where you've been so they can better appreciate what you're doing now. So for those listening to this podcast and not watching on YouTube, I am holding up a copy of Steve's new memoir, How I Found Myself in the Midwest.
I read it before this morning's podcast, Steve, and it's a compelling and at times very personal story of your sort of boomerang back to Minnesota and eventually to the Star Tribune where you are now. So just a quick recap. You grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, about 40 miles south of Minneapolis. Then you went off to Claremont McKenna College in California before getting your master's in public policy at Harvard. You worked at the Boston Globe and ABC News, and then you were one of the first 100 employees at YouTube and built its news and politics team. And after that, you were a senior executive at Google where you ran the Google News Lab, which for those of you who don't know, helps media companies and startups drive innovation. Then you left behind that high flying job in Silicon Valley and to camp back to Minnesota. And not long after that, you left the tech world and became the Minnesota Commissioner of Employment and Economic Development in the Cabinet of Governor Tim Walls.
And finally, I think it was about three years ago, Steve, you became the CEO of the Strib. So in the book, here's what you wrote about finding yourself back in the Midwest. "It taught me the power of going local. It taught me that putting yourself in an entirely new situation is often the best way to learn. It taught me that public service is a unique way to make a big impact. It taught me to invest in what makes your chosen community unique. It taught me the benefit of spending time with people who aren't just like you. "Very well said. So my first question is this, how is this personal and professional reinvention, the finding yourself back in the Midwest and all of your experiences, how's that informing your own reinvention of the Star Tribune these days?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, thanks, Tim. I feel honored to get to work at the Star Tribune. And as you might have guessed from going through that brief narrative of my own story, I had never really planned to become a newspaper publisher. I hadn't been on my radar from a career perspective, but boy is it an honor to get to work at a place like the Minnesota Star Tribune. Our state is unique in the sense that it has the highest statewide pride of any state in the country. There's a real sense of civic togetherness that people feel in Minnesota. You nodded to that a bit before. I'm sure we'll get into it when we talk about Operation Metro Surge, but there's a sense of community here and I don't mean to be too exceptionalist about it. Minnesota faces all the same challenges other states do. We've seen that play out certainly in the national stage.
And as a news organization, we face many of the same headwinds, but it's a pretty awesome example, I think, in Minnesota of a place that is trying to get this moment right. And the Strib, I think uniquely has remained stronger than most regional newspapers, but faces a pretty existential threat when it comes to the printed digital transition and a lot of the changes in technology. So all that to say, hopefully anybody who comes to a job like this one brings a bit of their background to it. And for me, both, I guess the experience in tech gives me a little bit of a different cultural lens on running a news organization. We're trying to build a place that will launch and iterate, that will have a bias towards action versus long studied analysis before doing a new initiative or new way, make money. We're trying to get a lot of attempts on the radar, a lot of shots on goal, if you will.
And then having been in government, a lot of my role in government during the crisis of COVID was to try to reimagine the institution to serve a state in crisis. And I think for us at this trip, we've had to reimagine our institution too. So yeah, like anybody, you bring your experience to your current role and hopefully that's helping, but I guess it remains to be seen. We're in the middle of a battle like everybody is.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah, absolutely. Well, Steve, so let's talk about bringing that experience that you had in tech. When you were at Google, you had sort of a bird's eye view of the transformation of the local news industry from the outside. Now you're trying to transform a local news organization from the inside. Is it harder than you thought it would be? What surprised you?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove It is harder than I thought it would be. I certainly came into the role of clear eyed. I mean, you can't look at the news industry today, and particularly local news and not understand the challenge at stake. I mean, 75% of the local journalists in our country have left the profession in the last 20 years.
Pew reports that 90% of Americans don't think they should have to pay for news. And news deserts are popping up across the country and certainly in Minnesota too. So they knew it would be a challenge. I think the reason I thought this was a challenge worth taking on is A, if we don't have local news, we don't have a democracy, full stop. And we also in Minnesota had an owner in Glen Taylor who wanted to reinvest in the publication, give it a new life. And so that struck me as, boy, if there's any place that's going to reinvent local news, why not Minnesota? But yes, harder than I thought. And I'd say in many ways, you know coming in that technology's going to change more and more quickly every year that you're there. And the advent of AI in particular has both created a tremendous amount of opportunity, but a huge existential threat to our basic business model of driving traffic to news articles.
So we're having to rethink things in an even more fundamental layer than maybe I might've imagined when I came in.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin I want to circle back on the question you just raised about AI and digital traffic, but before that, just I have a culture question for you. So in the book, you talked about taking over the state's economic development department and some of the cultural challenges that you faced in doing that. And of course, you walked in and COVID hit, and then that was followed by the tragic George Floyd situation. How have you found the culture inside the shrib and how are you trying to shape it during a time, as you just talked about, of absolute tumult inside the industry?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove One of the best things we have going for us is a culture that's very purpose-driven. I mean, you don't work at the Minnesota Star Tribune unless you really care about your state and you really care about journalism and democracy and access to information. So that's just a huge cultural tailwind: you've got a really purpose-driven workforce. On the other side of that, I would say it had been a print culture for a long time and a print culture is different than a digital culture. The rhythms of the day are different, how the journalism is conceived of is different. And so the big shift that my team and I have been trying to navigate is how do you build a digital culture? It's not just shifting from paper to pixels, it's shifting kind of how you operate. And the biggest thing there, I think is that willingness to try a bunch of things, even if not all of them will be successful.
And at Google, we had this model of like launch and iterate: get something out, see how it does, adapt it from there. And I think we're trying to build that culture here. It's harder because journalism is built on a culture that get everything right before you put it out there. That's really important, by the way, when it comes to the facts. When it comes to trying a new initiative, you want to have a bit more fluidity and take some bigger risks. And in government, we had to build that culture too during COVID. In government, of course, if you say one bad thing or make one mistake, you end up on the front page of a paper like ours.(09:57):
So we tried to build the spaces within government where the risk was possible. We're trying to do that within the Strib. We don't want to fiddle with the fundamental attribute of being a trustworthy news organization and that we are very careful with the journalism, but you can't apply that same culture to trying a new series or franchise or business idea. So that's been the trick. And I think people are on board with it, but it doesn't just happen overnight.
You have to build it and learn it and get some reps. And so we're just trying to get some reps.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin And it's obvious that transformation's underway and I want to circle back to that in a second. I know that our listeners and viewers are going to have a lot of interest in the news events in Minneapolis that occurred early this year. And so speaking of tumult, Operation Metro Surge at its peak, there were more than 4,000 federal agents in the Twin Cities involved in the immigration crackdown. Two residents, Renee Goode and Alex Pretty were tragically killed. There were mass demonstrations in your streets. Your newsroom produced, and I was following it, just really, Steve, some incredible public service journalism throughout that whole episode. And you've talked about in previous interviews, the kind of heroic work of your staff in the newsroom. So I wanted to take a slightly different angle to talking to you about Operation Metro Surge. As you know, trust in traditional media is a huge issue these days, and trust in local news is much higher than it is in national news, but it's still a bit of an issue for many consumers.
So what did you do? How was your coverage of this massive story consumed in your community? How did it help you improve trust and show your community that they could trust you, that they could trust your journalists and the information that was going out? And did you make some deliberate efforts to try to use this moment to help with trust?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Yeah. No, trust is the word that I think every news organization has had to focus on since the beginning of journalism really. And in moments of crisis, you really got to lean into that. And I'll say to start that I really give all credit to the newsroom and our editor. As publisher, I don't drive the journalism. I'm responsible for our organization and certainly work with our editor, but I give all the credit and focus on the way the newsroom operates in these moments. And our editor did some really smart things. I mean, I think number one, she really focused, and her name's Kathleen Hennessy, by the way. She comes from the New York Times and has been here for almost a year. She's been doing tremendous work. The first thing was to get a live blog up that was free. And I think you build trust when you say, "Hey, this is a crisis.
You need information. We're not going to look like we're just trying to profit off this moment." And so all of the main content that was fed, ours minute by minute from reporters, over 50 of them across the Twin Cities was free. And believe it or not, we got most of our subscriptions from that free page. People who came to that free live blog subscribed there because they saw the value in the journalism and they trusted we didn't have some other motive other than simply to make sure people knew what was happening. I think that's number one. Number two, I think the way that the newsroom worked very closely with bystander footage generated trust. We didn't think for a second that we were going to be the sole source of information on this. This was, I think, the most documented crisis in American history. I can't think of another, just given the
scale of what happened. And so our journalists were not just out there themselves, which they were, but they were analyzing video that came in. And of course, the two most important videos of this whole crisis have been the shooting of Alex Pretty and the shooting of Renee Goode. And those videos were analyzed pixel by pixel by our team and wrapped context around them. And so that was a major component of it. And then I think the last thing was fighting back disinformation. I mean, there's a lot
disinformation, AI generated images out there, near-do-wells who glom onto these crises and try to use them to put their own political aims forward. And so a big part of the way we build trust is to go out there and debunk that misinformation and show our readers and others that we're out there trying to fight for what is actually true. And not to put our own spin on it, not to put our perspective on it, but just to say, "Hey, this is an actual piece of footage. This isn't. This is the truth." You need that kind of an institution in a crisis to navigate it. And I think this tribe did as well as we might've expected, and I am really proud of the team. I think in a moment where the state demanded something from us, I do feel like the team delivered and we're proud of that.
It's why we do this work.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin You absolutely should be. And we live in this moment of just a torrent of disinformation and misinformation that's out there. And I think this is an example of how legacy news can really step in and play a huge role in setting the record straight. And I thought that you all did that incredibly effectively. So let's talk for a second about the business impact of all this. So I've read that you had an increase in subscribers during this time. I'm sure that your traffic must have been extraordinarily high during Operation Metro Surge. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then what can you do to continue to build momentum from that in terms of building readership?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, we did see record levels of traffic and subscriptions and donations, by the way, as well. We now have philanthropic arm that can pull in donations. And we got support from over 45 states, I think 46 maybe in the country who donated people from those states donated to us. So there was a lot of attention and focus. I think it was a bit of a rallying cry moment for local news and local news needs rallying cry moments to remind people that it matters. Unfortunately, there's probably many communities in this country where if this had happened there, the only response locally would've been Facebook groups and blogs, if you will. And so I think having a statewide news organization really helps. But that spike levels off, of course, over time. Just from a business perspective, what we then try to figure out is, okay, we now have all these new subscribers who might not even live here.
How do we keep them?
So we're treating that cohort that came in January and February almost as its own cohort and trying to deliver for them significant news content, regional news content that can keep them around because you want to expand your audience. And when you have a chance to do that, you have to find ways to hold them in. And so that's been a new project for us in the wake of all this.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin We also saw kind of this huge spike in readership during COVID, which I think was another one of those watershed moments for local news when people needed reliable, accurate news and information to keep their families safe and healthy during the pandemic. And there was this huge spike at a lot of local news organizations during that time, and understandably so, but we've now seen that tail off in subsequent years. I'm sure our audience would be interested in hearing you talk about ... So how do you do that? How do you maintain or try to maintain that level of readership that you've seen over the past couple of months?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, I think broadly speaking, just from a basic brand perspective, we have to stick our neck out there and talk more about our work. And that's part of why I'm on this podcast and why we do these sort of externalappearances is just to remind people. I think when you start thinking about local news is this just dependable inevitability that it's there because it's been there for 158 years, you forget that nothing's inevitable. And in fact, local news fakes is an existential challenge. So part of it is just we've tried to make more noise. We rebranded our company, we expanded to the whole of Minnesota, we reshaped our digital platform. A lot of this was about the digital underpinnings of shifting to a digital subscription model, but it was also just like an awareness play like, "Hey, we're here! Pay attention." You got to get the funnel broader, to your point. Yeah. News is always goingto be a cyclical business. When big news happens, you're going to get those influxes. You better take advantage of them or you probably shouldn't be in the business. But it's what happens in the downtimes is probably as important, which is to say, how do you really look at the data? What are people interested in? How do you target the content of what they need? We need to be worth paying for. And that's on us, right?
You can't just wench about, "Oh, no one wants to buy a subscription anymore." Boo-hoo. Well, that is the challenge we face, but we want to take some agency in this moment and say, "That's on us to make sure this subscription is something someone will prioritize just as much as Disney+ or Netflix or Beer the Month or the trampoline park for their kids or any other number of
subscriptions in their wallet." And so if we start from there and as a business, look for ways we can provide value and not just in the journalism, but in events and in cause marketing and a host of other businesses, I think we have a shot, but it's hard and none of that is even inevitable, but it just takes hard work and a focus on your audience. I think for so long, news organizations over the last 10 or 15 years because of this massive wave and technology change and social media platforms kind of ceded that audience relationship to third parties or to other institutions.We’re trying to take that back.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's kind of old as capitalism itself. You have to have a product that people are willing to pay for. And so doing the quality journalism that you're doing at a moment of crisis, I think demonstrates why you're worth subscribing to and investing in. So anyway, so let's talk about growing your business and some of the recent initiatives that you've undertaken at the Strib to try to do that. We just published a story on the Middle Local News Initiative website about your huge investment in high school sports, Strib varsity, as you call it. How's that going?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove It's going well. And by that, I mean, we are learning by the week how to get this right. It is a very fulsome effort. It's one of our bigger bets, if you will. It is in some ways the most obvious bet. It's like what's more local than your kids' high school sports? And it scales really well because it's in every community across the state. That core idea of if your kid's name is in the paper, you'll buy a copy of the paper is kind of at the center of it. But in a digital age, it's much different than simply that kind of documentarian impulse. It's how do you relevant every single day with scores and stats and the latest analysis and being the sort of essential destination for high school sports in your state. And so it is helping us drive subscriptions. We hope ultimately we can create enough value there that it can be its own kind of add-on subscription so that we can generate more revenue from it rather than just having it be another way to increase overall subscriptions.
We're not there yet, but we want to create something that's that valuable.
There's a lot of high school sports initiatives out there that focus on recruiting or the NIL market or what have you. And there's some really important efforts there. We want to be for everybody though. I think for an organization like ours, we want to scale from the starter to the fifth string, if you will, and make everyone feel like they can be represented in our platform. Our goal is to have every player in the state who is on a varsity sport see themselves reflected on our platform in some way. So a lot you can do with AI on that front, a lot you can do with just expanding your reporting progress and then with data and analysis. But we're off to the races. Big driver for us has been live streams. We license those through partners, but that's still even in a post- COVID world drives traffic and subscriptions from people who can't be at the game.
And so trying to follow where the heat is.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah, absolutely. And one of the very smart strategies of the New York Times is to build content verticals that are adjacent to your core news product. And that's kind of what you're doing with Strib Varsity in many ways. Are you thinking about that as like a standalone separate subscription? Would that be part of a bundle? How would that work exactly or are you still working through that?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, it is certainly a vertical. And I think Job one is just to build something of immense value within that vertical. And I think this is how the Times did it too, right? They began with a games effort and built it. And once it's at a point where you feel like you can sell a standalone subscription, then you do. So I hope we get to that point at somewhere along the line, or maybe it's an add-on or a plus up or some version of that. I don't think any local news organization has quite landed the New York Times model.
(22:37):
But there's a version of it, and I think this might be our version of it if we get it right. So that's the idea and we're on our way. But you got to build ... Before asking somebody to get the cash out of their wall, they better really believe you have something of value. And in the past, this gets back to your culture question. The Strib might have spent three years getting exactly the right product and launched the perfect thing that is instantly valuable in their minds. But our new culture is, no, let's just get a basic product out there and get user feedback immediately and see what do people like? What do they know? What is the data telling us? And that kind of launch and iterate model for us is a more product led model rather than just an editorial led model, but I think an important one.
And Strib Varsity is probably the best example of us getting that right.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin So Steve, are there other products that you've recently launched or maybe you can make news today and tell us about other products that you're planning to launch? But I mean, kind of in all seriousness, are there other areas that you're looking at or thinking about or maybe have just launched?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Maybe two worth mentioning. One is not necessarily new, but new to us, which is a platform we have called Minnesota Rising. And it's essentially a cause marketing platform where it's not driven by the newsroom, it's driven by our advertising team, but we write pieces that amplify the social good that Minnesota corporates are doing in the community. And that can be a lucrative model. And so we have, I think, over 25 local corporates signed up for that. Another is more based on our journalism. It's called the North Star Franchise. And we kicked it off with a Ideas Festival last fall, but it's essentially kind of a high value business intelligence, a business insider kind of product for our market here that convenes and elevates public officials, businesses and others through a series of events, through a twice weekly newsletter by Ally Kaplan is amazing journalist we hired to run it.
And so that's one where I think we're able to try to go after an audience that can pay and maybe eventually a corporate expense card kind of market. And so obviously Minnesota has this dense network of Fortune 500s. How do we take advantage of that as a business becomes the kind of animating question there?
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah. And just a quick thought on that. Some local news organizations, I'm thinking of say the Texas Tribune has done a great job with event revenue with their Texas Tribune Festival. It sounds like what you're talking about might be a Minnesota version of that, or do you see potential in events? I
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Think we do, yeah. I think we've obviously looked at their model. It's very enviable. 15 years in, they've built just a juggernaut of a franchise with that festival. We certainly aspire to have kind of the upper Midwest version of that event, our own take on it. But in the North Star Summit last fall was, we think, a wildly successful debut effort with a lot of attention and attendees and a lot of buzz. So I think the events business is certainly one of our lines. You got to build it in the in between times too with some digital infrastructure between, but we think that can be valuable and hopefully attract sponsors that aren't just Minnesota-based.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So wanted to get to a couple of industry trends with you before we have to go. There's considerable buzz and some might say almost panic among many publishers. And I just came from a conference with some publishers this week about a major drop off in digital traffic that's occurring at some news organizations. And it really started a few years ago when Meta changed its algorithm and began to de- emphasize news. And now it seems that traffic from search, I'm not saying at your place, but at a lot of places are beginning to take a hit from consumers going directly to AI platforms and bypassing search. Could you talk a little bit about whether those trends are affecting you, what you're hearing about those trends in the industry, and what are the implications of all that?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, they definitely affect us. Yeah. I mean, social traffic has taken a major hit and our search traffic has gone down too. If you can get the answer to a question on a results landing page, Google search results landing page and not have come to a new site, that threatens one of our major traffic drivers. So I think licensing deals are really important with those platforms and we're pursuing that. And then I think also making sure that you're a destination worth coming to directly is really important. But yeah, these are some real threats we face.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin So Steve, feel free not to answer this question if you don't want, but we're seeing kind of different tactics between news organizations on how to address this AI question. So the New York Times, for example, has filed a lawsuit alleging copyright violation of the AI platforms using their content in their LLMs. Other news organizations, the AP, for example, has actually signed a licensing agreement to get compensated for that. Have you settled on a strategy, which it sounds like you may be pursuing the licensing fee strategy.
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Well, we're looking at all of them. I wouldn't say we've settled on one yet. I think in general, given my background, you might guess that I think if we can work with tech companies on this front versus fighting them, we have maybe a better chance of success. Yeah. I can totally see what the New York Times is doing what they're doing. I can totally see what the AP is doing, what they're doing. We're much smaller than both. So we're not as much, not that we can't get meetings, but we're not worth the same level of focus from these larger platforms right now. So we're trying to be better together with other local news partners. But I'd say we're looking at both directions for ourselves.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Yeah. It's a big question and I think everybody's trying to figure it out and trying to answer the question just as you are. So last question on sticking on the AI topic. It's having a broad impact across all industries, not just local news, but could you talk about how you're using AI now, how you're thinking about using AI in the future, maybe both in terms of your business functions as well as in the newsroom?
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Yeah. Well, I think one is just efficiency in the newsroom. How can we take some of those more tedious journalistic tasks and use AI to accomplish them while still holding the integrity of our journalism at the highest level? I think second is product focused. How can we get people using our product through AI in ways that make surprise and delight part of their experience with us? And then third, just in a broader business sense outside of the newsroom, just how do we deliver our services to clients in ways that AI can really accelerate and amplify our human abilities. So we're looking at it across the organization. It's a company-wide priority. We want to be optimistic and run towards the future rather than run away from it. And that takes a company-wide commitment to it.
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin Well, Steve, thank you so much for your time today and for joining us.
Tim Franklin -
Steve Grove Yeah, thanks for having me!
Steve Grove -
Tim Franklin It has been a lot of fun for me and I've learned a lot just listening to you as I always do when I talk to you. I learn something new. So thanks for that. Thanks for being our very first guest on the State of Local News podcast and to our Our audience, I want to thank you for joining us. Look for us every month on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Medilla Local News Initiative website. I especially want to thank the MacArthur Foundation for its support of this podcast, and we will catch you again next month.
Tim Franklin
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