Aug 28, 2026 · 36 min · 15 segments
Steve Grove left a career in Silicon Valley to come home and take on one of the hardest jobs in American media: leading a nearly 160-year-old newspaper into a future it isn't guaranteed to have. As…
Steve GroveGuest
Elizabeth KitzenbergHost
Well, just to put some hard facts to it, in the last 20 years, America has lost 75 percent of its local journalists.
And as it relates to the institutions themselves, we've lost about a third of our newspapers in Minnesota in the last 10 years.
And it's something every Minnesotan should care about, regardless of your political background or view of the news in the world, because all the statistics will also show you that when local news goes down, polarization goes up.
Donations to charity falter considerably when you don't have strong and rich local information ecosystems to put it.
Anyway, all that says is you need local news organizations to thrive as a community.
On the more challenging end of the spectrum, you've seen private equity firms buy up newspapers and try to sort of strip them for parts and get them down to the core essentials.
But often they're owned in those cases by owners who live outside of the locale in which those papers are based.
In other cases, you've seen papers shift entirely to nonprofit models, dump their paywall, rely entirely on donations.
I think that would be not the right strategy for us and for so many because the subscription revenue and value proposition is part of our culture and our revenue model.
And then you've seen these kind of hybrid models where, say, a news organization might be owned by a foundation and the foundation is kicked off with an endowment.
And there is a component of the revenue streams that that news organization gets from philanthropy that augment the broader system.
Well, just to put some hard facts to it, in the last 20 years, America has lost 75 percent of its local journalists.
And as it relates to the institutions themselves, we've lost about a third of our newspapers in Minnesota in the last 10 years.
And it's something every Minnesotan should care about, regardless of your political background or view of the news in the world, because all the statistics will also show you that when local news goes down, polarization goes up.
Donations to charity falter considerably when you don't have strong and rich local information ecosystems to put it.
Anyway, all that says is you need local news organizations to thrive as a community.
On the more challenging end of the spectrum, you've seen private equity firms buy up newspapers and try to sort of strip them for parts and get them down to the core essentials.
But often they're owned in those cases by owners who live outside of the locale in which those papers are based.
In other cases, you've seen papers shift entirely to nonprofit models, dump their paywall, rely entirely on donations.
I think that would be not the right strategy for us and for so many because the subscription revenue and value proposition is part of our culture and our revenue model.
And then you've seen these kind of hybrid models where, say, a news organization might be owned by a foundation and the foundation is kicked off with an endowment.
And there is a component of the revenue streams that that news organization gets from philanthropy that augment the broader system.
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