A Q&A with newspaper publisher — and former tech exec — Steve Grove
Grove worked on the tech side of news at Google for years. Now he's trying to steer the Midwest's largest newsroom through the stormy waters of politics, A.I. and more in a perilous moment for media.
A lot of folks have left media over the years to go work in other industries — technology, communications, politics come to mind. It’s a pretty well-trod route, and one that has only grown more common as the news business has struggled. You take the hard-earned experience you gained in the trenches as a reporter, and cash it in for a position with more stability, maybe more comfort, and hopefully not too much less excitement.
Steve Grove took the reverse route. After a lengthy career as an early employee at YouTube and Google led to a gig as the state of Minnesota’s jobs czar, Grove went further down the civic rabbit hole, taking the helm of the Minnesota Star Tribune as CEO and publisher in 2023. Last June, Grove published a memoir about his decision to return to Minnesota, How I Found Myself in the Midwest, which traces this reverse commute — from Silicon Valley back to “home.”
Grove worked for years at the intersection of technology and the news, as the Head of News and Politics at YouTube in its early days, then the director of the Google News Lab.
Now, he is in charge of The Star Tribune, which has stood out in a sea of declining local news organizations as a bright spot: it’s been profitable in the ten years since billionaire Glen Taylor, the former owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, purchased it in 2014. And it’s been expanding. Grove and I talked about the fraught relationship between tech firms and media companies, what fairness means in 2025, and why they are aggressively trying to get a handle on the A.I. revolution in more ways than one. A lightly edited version of our conversation appears below.
Eli Rosenberg: Hi Steve, thanks for chatting with us today. Tell us about your journey to reinvent the Tribune — do you see yourself as reimagining the future of news, or just finding ways to do the things that newspapers have always done?
Steve Grove: I'm about two and a half years in, and we've changed a lot already. We already have more digital subscriptions than print for example. But it's not just a matter of, “Oh, let's just take the news that was once printed on paper and turn it into pixels.” It's a whole new way of operating a company. To your point, journalism has a culture around it that everything must be a polished pearl before it is released. It can be kind of a cautious culture that's good in the sense that you want a high quality bar. But also when you're trying to change a company to be more digital, innovative and faster moving, you have to be willing to try new formats, mediums, ways to connect with the audiences and frankly, try new business models to generate the funding required to fund what in our case is the largest newsroom in the entire Midwest of over 220 journalists.
ER: I feel like I’ve lived through four lifetimes of newspaper innovations and never-ending attempts to reimagine the business model. Do longform more; invest in short video or live Facebook feeds; audio and podcasts; newsletters; clicky social media driven-content and on. What does innovation look like for you all?
SG: I would operate from the premise that there's no silver bullet: many of the things you just mentioned should be done and should be done well. It's not necessarily that all the ideas that have to be perfect, but the execution has to be really strong. And in general the orientation has to be more innovative and forward-looking. News organizations missed the internet broadly speaking, and certainly are a danger of missing A.I. if we don't lean in more heavily there.
I have found news organizations tend to be oriented around primarily quality and less audience. Today we have to be far more audience-centric if we're going to get things right. It doesn't mean just going to the lowest common denominator of what gets the most clicks, but it's engaging audiences where they're at and with things that they desperately need and think are worth paying for. That's the big thing. To convince people they have to pay for it, you have to really deliver a value proposition. And to do that, you have to know what they want. That big shift towards audience and away from simply quality is something that tech companies get intuitively. That's how I was brought up at Google, but I found news organizations don't always lean towards that because of the traditions of journalism.
ER: One of the sort of structural problems I ran into when I worked for years in local news, was what worked for local audiences, didn’t necessarily work for the economics of the internet. Serving a small community means covering that late night school board meeting, a neighborhood issue that may only affect a few blocks of residents, a complicated zoning dispute — issues that many people care deeply about, but also aren’t going to deliver the size of audiences or virality that we’ve come to expect on the internet. Tech companies haven't really had to navigate that quandary; they've just gone big and bigger. Scale is the word of the moment. But being local and rooted is the opposite. How do you both serve your community while also generating the size of audience you need to survive in the digital era?
SG: Hopefully we have better data than we had back then and can try to get a little bit more pattern recognition on what kinds of things are going to click. High school sports, for example, when we go deep there, we can get a lot of subscribers who want to see their kid in the paper, who want to engage more deeply with that particular area, and they'll subscribe to the entire bundle just for that one reason.
But it's also an artistic endeavor. You never fully know until it's out there. We do look a lot at the data about subscriptions. We have tried to detach ourselves from feeling like we have to be the paper of record and at every single legislative hearing. A) We can't, and B) To your point, a lot of this stuff does not take off. That doesn't mean not doing journalism, but we have to be able to find the needle in the haystack of stories that are the most important and not feel like it's our job just to show up. And so that's been a pretty big shift for us as an institution.
It's not that we don't wish there were a human being at every single public meeting, because sometimes that's where you discover stories. But with transcripts and A.I., you can find other ways to sift through existing public data, to find the gems. Ultimately it comes back to what's going to convert someone to subscribe.
The good news is it's not just cat videos. In fact, it's very rarely the stuff that's light and cheap because that stuff you can get anywhere. It's more often the deep investigative story or the really quality restaurant review or the hyperlocal piece that really can change a community. That is what converts people. We have to do that at scale, and that's the challenge. And I think that's what everyone's trying to figure out with decreasing numbers of journalists in this country.
ER: You worked in tech in a way that I think has a lot of adjacencies to journalism and traditional media. In the news business, there’s long been criticism of the relationship with tech companies — whether traditional media companies have gotten their fair shake in terms of ad money and other revenue, for their role producing the content that props up big tech products like social media and Google News. From having worked on the tech side, what do you think those critics get wrong?
SG: There's a lot Google got wrong. But I would say that culturally Google is a place that — I can speak for when I was there — had its heart in the right place. Google's mission is organize world's information, make it universally accessible and useful. That does not feel too dissonant with journalism. But let's face it, the ad market that Google gobbled up like that when it reinvented search advertising and suddenly the monopoly that newspapers had on this medium has fundamentally disrupted journalism. So people might think that Google doesn't care. My sense was that Google did care and was trying new things to do, but frankly didn't quite know how to do them.
And sometimes the technology moves faster than the ability of those who created it to really mitigate any of its side effects. Google's a for-profit company trying to win at the end of the day. And so I went to Google I/O this year and there was not much in the way of placation of publishers, at a moment when A.I. is taking things over. Because Google feels now very much competitive with OpenAI in ways that they're ultimately beholden to, with their shareholders.
I'd say also people in the Valley don't always get publishing. They don't always get news. It's hard to find someone who works at Google who really understands the struggles of a publisher, and oftentimes those people aren't the people who are making the most important decisions at the company. I think while the DNA may be in the right place in practice, there haven't been a lot of huge solutions that have come out of these places that feel much different from charity.
ER: Obviously the economics of the internet have been rough for media companies, large and small. And all of these things risk getting worse with A.I. You're not even getting your one out of every, whatever 100 clicks to your story. The information you worked hard to produce is getting fully synthesized into an A.I. summary at the top of search, no click through needed. What are some solutions you see to bridging the gap between these winner-take-all systems that largely benefit big tech, and people and companies that actually make content and intellectual property, whose work is time consuming and expensive?
SG: Well, I am worried about Google Zero, which means suddenly the traffic that we get from Google approaches a very small number and perhaps zero…We have to figure out the business model for A.I. that somehow pays quality creators for their content in a meaningful way, whether that's a licensing agreement, whether that's a flat fee, whether that's some other model. What tech companies will tell you is, well, that sounds good, we want to be able to do that, but just so you know, we don't really need your content to have effective A.I. algorithms. The content within journalism is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive amount of information on the web. And while it is the highest quality content out there, what I've heard a lot of technology people say, and I'm not just pinpointing Google here, is that it really is kind of charity.
ER: Do you think that's true?
SG: I don't know because I'm not inside of their algorithm, but I would struggle to imagine that the whole thing fits together and works if there isn't also quality content on the web that you can trust. The broader ecosystem demands that you have authoritative sources of information that people can lean on, otherwise the trust in the system starts to crumble. So the macro view has to be, you need The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Minnesota Star Tribune, and many others who are trusted and actually do boots on the ground reporting or the whole system kind of falls apart. And I think already you're seeing how slop on the internet is changing people's views of the quality of some of these algorithms. More broadly to your point, yes, we need an answer on how we get our content licensed and paid for in these algorithms. Full stop. You have to be able to be paid for these pieces and there's no model there yet.
Philanthropy is something we've really leaned into heavily. We're asking for donations. That's sort of a new revenue model. I can't imagine a world in which, if journalism is a civic good in the same way that broadband or healthcare or any number of other civic goods is, we're going to need government money to save journalism. Especially when it comes to hyperlocal and local like us, you're going to need some degree of government funding to play a significant part in the business model if we want it to operate at scale.
ER: Did you follow the scuttled effort in California to require Google to hand over more of the ad revenue from Google News to news publishers, and would you support similar efforts in Minnesota and elsewhere?
SG: Broadly I do support efforts that find market driven solutions to this that might come in the flavor of tax, either credits or incentives or spending incentives. For example, hire a journalist and get tax-free labor for a year on that hiring.
There have to be models that match market behavior a little bit more, whether they're precisely like the one that was in California, I don't know. If it's just take a pound of flesh from tech and hand it over to media, I just feel like media is always going to lose those battles in a practical sense.
But I'd say, you're going to do something radical to say this, and it's not just going to be one company, it's going to be the whole ecosystem of the internet has to have something that works for news organizations. The whole kind of thing is teetering on this foundation that's itself pretty shaky right now.
ER: This is a very intense moment politically, after Charlie Kirk's assassination and well, just so much going on and changing very quickly. Free speech as always is a major topic – what it is, what it isn’t, what are its limits. What does objectivity mean to you, as a newspaper publisher in a climate where everything is suddenly up for debate?
SG: I certainly believe in the philosophical concept of objectivity. There are facts out there, and the minute we think there are not facts out there, we're in trouble. I also think that people do want to know the truth. I don't think we woke up one day and suddenly everybody said, I don't want to find quality journalistic content. There's a demand for it. I think the internet has fragmented the sources from which we get it, and trust in institutions has fallen so rapidly, media included, that it's just harder to deliver.
Nothing's changed about the art of journalism in the sense of it is a pursuit of the truth through investigation and rigor and some core practices of the art. But I think unfortunately right now, everyone's understanding of some of those guidelines is starting to fall apart.
I share a lot of the concerns that are behind your question for sure. I think that it is a fraught time in media, and I do think that it is the job of journalists to hold a mirror to society and report the news. Journalism is not generally seen as a profession of advocacy, at least in our news pages.
Are there editorial boards like ours that will take a stand on something like gun violence, which has been an extremely hot topic in our state given the political assassinations and school shootings we've had here in a really horrific summer? Yes, but ultimately I think the job of journalism is to report the facts, lift them up, help society see them and then civic leaders take the baton from there and do what they will.
ER: How are you guys looking at A.I. at The Star Tribune? Are you incorporating it in any other ways you're engaging with it?
SG: Yeah, well, we're wearing a few hats on this, but at least two I'll mention here. We need to be in Washington and our state capital here in Minnesota, engaging with legislators and others on what the overall model for licensing and use of our content is going to be, moving forward. And that is a largely defensive posture.
Then, there are some tasks of journalism that are easily automatable without leading to robot reporting — everything from note taking to layout. That’s stuff we'd be silly not to do. It just makes our jobs quicker and easier, and we should embrace that. But ultimately, we have to position ourselves as almost the anti A.I. in a way. We have human beings. They're out in the streets, they have notebooks and pencils, and they're actually watching the event. You can trust them. Positioning-wise, we do not want to be in robot reporter territory.
ER: Thanks for your time Steve.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
A.I. researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky is on tour to promote a new book he co-authored with Nate Soares, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All,” which is drawing clicks and headlines for fear-inducing proclamations about the mass death and calamity Yudkowsky says these systems will unleash. Fortune reporter Sharon Goldman is having none of it, posting a note from Yudkowsky’s PR person trying to pitch her an interview with him and writing that: “He treats catastrophe (that is, AI will almost certainly kill us all unless we halt progress entirely) as inevitable, leaving no room for nuance — which undercuts his credibility. If he really believed it, he would not simply be focused on publicity and going on a book tour.”
An excerpt from Yudkowsky and Soares’ book in The Atlantic.
And another good, critical piece on the book in Vox.
A new filing in a lawsuit against traffic safety cameras in Virginia shows the scale of surveillance that is becoming the norm in parts of the country: a motorist whose location was logged by cameras 849 times over a period of five months, or an average of more than six times a day.
A splashy unveiling for Meta’s new A.I. glasses was beset by glitches during the live demos, including a cooking demonstration with a food influencer whose specs were supposed to tell him how to make a steak sauce. “What do I do first,” the influencer, Jack Mancuso, begged the glasses repeatedly, to no avail.
Another prominent effort from Democrats to try to increase the viability of the party by tacking to the middle.
The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C., has a graphic that breaks down the data on the ideology behind political murders since 9/11, divided by “right,” “left,” “Islamism,” and a few other ideologies. Worth taking a look amid the intensity and nastiness of the current debate.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.