
Episode #12
Star Tribune CEO Steve Grove
Send us Fan Mail For more than a year, I’ve been talking with Steve Grove about the future of news, the Minesota Star Tribune, and what it means to lead a civic institution in 2025. In this conversation, I finally got to ask him the questions on the record: the role of billionaire owners in journalism, whether local news can survive the digital age, what really happened inside DEED during Covid, and why he chose to write a memoir that reads suspiciously like a political launch. Steve is the CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune and former head of DEED, and he spent years at YouTube shaping the early creator era. This isn’t a surface-level media interview. It’s a deeper look at how journalism actually works, how power moves behind the scenes, and what’s at stake for Minnesota. If you want more conversations like this, subscribe to One Hour Detours. And if you want more of my regular Minnesota stories, you can always find them on One Minute Tours. You can purchase Steve's book, "How I Found Myself in the Midwest" here: https://amzn.to/49efESL (affiliate link). ⸻ Chapters 00:00 Who Steve Grove is and how long we’ve been talking 01:03 Writing a book while running the Star Tribune 04:20 The accidental political energy of his memoir 07:53 What government service really looks like from the inside 10:14 Why bureaucracy frustrates people but still matters 12:19 How polarization affects Minnesota differently 17:15 Has our culture actually recovered from Covid 20:10 The Minnesota paradox and the gaps we don’t talk about 23:23 Steve’s move from government to running the Star Tribune 24:31 Closing the printing plant and what that means 27:01 How digital subscriptions changed the business 29:00 The value of print, serendipity, and the E-edition 33:48 How the Star Tribune sets the agenda 36:03 The Pete Hegseth text messages story 39:47 What a publisher actually does inside an investigative scoop 41:14 The editorial independence question 41:35 Is it good for America to have media owned by billionaires 43:33 Conflicts of interest and whether they matter 44:31 Who should own the news in the future 46:09 How creators changed the landscape 47:20 Should creators be doing the job journalism used to do 49:04 What Steve learned from the early YouTube era






