When Steve Grove left Minnesota for Silicon Valley, he didn't plan on coming back.
After successful careers with Google and YouTube during the height of the tech boom, Grove found himself drawn to his home state. He began working in state government as the Minnesota commissioner of employment and economic development during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then reinvented himself into a new career as publisher/CEO of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
In his new memoir, How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention, he comes to see Minnesota as more than his home state, but a place for renewal and purpose.
Much of his memoir takes a look at how change, in career or geography can be a catalyst for reinvention. For Grove, the Midwest and Minnesota is not fly-over country, it is fly-to country.
"When you get down to the local level, there's a lot more hope," he said in a recent KAXE Morning Show conversation. "I do think the Midwest itself has a lot more hope for us all right now."
"The local news, more so than national news, has a shot at holding us together just by the very virtue of having fact-based information we can rely on and trust."Minnesota Star Tribune CEO and Publisher Steve Grove
Grove reflected on the complexity of today's media landscape and emphasized the importance of local.
"I never planned to be a newspaper publisher, if I'm honest with you," he said. "Few people do, especially in the year 2025."
As the biggest newsroom in the Midwest, the Minnesota Star Tribune employs over 200 journalists and still faces what Grove calls an existential headwinds with the loss of 20% of print subscribers each year.
"As KAXE shows, when you have a good local news organization in your community, you just get better outcomes, right? More people vote, more people pay attention, more people donate to charity," Grove said with a nod to the station.
Grove stressed trust in media in both the Star Tribune and KAXE.
"I'm sure the listeners of KAXE trust you more than they trust any national outlet," he said. "It's just more proximate, it's more real."
Grove said changing from the Minneapolis Star Tribune to the Minnesota Star Tribune was an opportunity to be a statewide organization, not to replace hyper local news organizations.
"The local news, more so than national news, has a shot at holding us together just by the very virtue of having fact-based information we can rely on and trust," Grove said, adding that without local outlets, a Facebook group may be the only source of news. "We lost, in the last 10 years, 75% of the local journalists in this country."
By investing in news and reporters, the Minnesota Star Tribune has seen how more investigative stories leads to more subscribers, Grove said. News is not cheap and comes at a cost.
"If you're going to trust the content you're getting, you've probably got to pay for it, because you have real journalists with real notebooks and real pencils and real shoe leather out there doing the work."
Grove added, "I'm sure many of your listeners right now enjoy KAXE, even might not have donated before. They should, by the way. They absolutely should."
Listen to the full conversation above.
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