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).
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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
