Steve Grove is the CEO and publisher of The Minnesota Star Tribune. In August, the 157-year-old media company unveiled a major rebranding of all its platforms, including the newspaper, website and a revamped opinion section. Grove answered questions from the LMA team about the changes.

“Start with listening” is something we say at the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding when we advise newsrooms learning to raise philanthropic support. What was the reason you started with a listening tour at the start of your tenure, and have continued it?

I wanted to get a sense for how Minnesota viewed our organization. We’ve been around for so long, but after a while you’re like furniture. People just expect you to be there. We needed to ask people what they thought of us and what they valued, and what the gaps in our coverage were. We knew we needed a new plan for our future, so we had to start with hearing from our customers — and would-be customers. That’s a feedback loop we have to keep going.

Many newsrooms have scaled back opinion coverage. It seems like in the rebrand you are expanding your coverage in that section. Why?

I think opinion journalism is so important for a local paper. It’s a water cooler that everyone can gather around. But we needed to take a fresh look at how to make that water cooler more lively, and to lean into personality and voice. That’s why we reshaped our work as “Strib Voices” and made some big changes in how we approach the category. Bringing in a new leader from the outside — Phil Morris — was a big part of that change. He’s phenomenal and is bringing fresh eyes and new energy to the group.

Why do you think it’s important to invest in marketing and outreach to Minnesota audiences? Is this more important for well-established news outlets to reintroduce themselves to younger audiences?

If you’re not telling your story, then other people will! I think it’s important to show people you’re working hard, and asking for their support. Nothing about our future is inevitable. We need to work for every subscription. Marketing is just one piece of that puzzle, but it’s an important one. That said, we didn’t spend a dime on marketing until we’d refashioned our offering to be worthy of asking for a fresh look.

The Minnesota Star Tribune faces a lot of the same revenue challenges that other metro daily newspapers face. What is the revenue mix that you think will continue to sustain your growth and service to the community? Are you more optimistic about some revenue streams vs. others?

Digital subscriptions are our north star, and we continue to have a healthy advertising business. Our sense is that, in the next few years, we need at least 25% of our revenue to come from outside those two categories. Philanthropy, events, e-commerce, and content initiatives — both journalistic and otherwise — are all part of our thinking right now. And I’m sure there will be many others. Some will fail and others will succeed but we have to be thinking about new ways to capture revenue that match modern consumer behavior and meet a core need of our customers.

We love the mascot. Why was that important to add as part of your company culture or audience outreach?

We’re a 157-year old newspaper — we had to show people we could have some fun! And lean into local. Minnesota has long been the only state that calls the children’s game, “Duck, Duck, Goose,” “Duck Duck, Gray Duck” instead, so we went with “Stribby the Gray Duck” as a nod to our home state.

The relaunch of the website and branding likely involved a lot of leadership on the product and technology side of the company, as well as the newsroom. How have you invested in that team since you started?

We hired the first-ever Chief Product Officer at the Strib, Aron Pilhofer, who is phenomenal. We got a lot of different teams involved in imagining our new platform. We had some product debt to make up but also wanted to leapfrog into new places. I tell people all the time we need to have the hearts of journalists and the heads of technologists.

What keeps you up at night about the local media industry? What gets you up in the morning?

Existentially, the thing that keeps me up at night is the state of community connection in America. We need institutions to hold us together at a time of such division. I’m betting that a statewide newspaper, using the craft of journalism, can be one of those institutions and play a role in a much-needed revival.

Capturing the attention and buy-in of news consumers who simply don’t want to pay for news is the business challenge that keeps me up at night. Finding solutions to that problem is the thing that gets me up in the morning. I feel very lucky to work on a great team focused on such a meaty and important challenge for our state. We haven’t figured everything out, but I’m betting on our team and on Minnesota.