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, editor or leader, 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.
