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THE MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE KEEPS QUIETLY doing the thing legacy newsrooms have to do if they want to stay relevant: put real people with real instincts in charge of the parts of the operation that matter most.
The paper announced this week that Jess Bellville has been named head of audience strategy and Mark Baumgarten has been selected as outdoors editor — two hires that say more about where the Star Tribune is headed than any mission statement ever could.
Bellville arrives from Twin Cities PBS, where she built audience growth the hard way — platform by platform, habit by habit — at a time when “reach” stopped being theoretical and started being existential.
“Jess will lead a team that is at the center of this organization’s transformation. Very little happens in this newsroom without the Audience team’s involvement,” said Kathleen Hennessey, editor and senior vice president for the Minnesota Star Tribune. “Jess is a creative, energetic and data-savvy leader with years of experience in finding new ways to deliver journalism to Minnesotans.”
That resume is less buzzword and more proof-of-work.
At TPT, Bellville created the TPToriginals.org site, helped shape “Stage,” a local music concert series, expanded access to PBS programming across platforms, and built the organization’s YouTube presence from scratch. She also led an aggressive email strategy that produced real numbers — 80 percent growth in TPT’s email list over three years, 85,000 YouTube subscribers, and more than 100,000 PBS app downloads.
Those are not vanity metrics. Those are habits forming.
Bellville is a Carleton College graduate with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. At the Star Tribune, she will work closely with product, data, and growth and marketing partners — the connective tissue between journalism and the people it’s supposed to reach.
Baumgarten steps into the outdoors editor role with a mandate that fits Minnesota like a well-worn pair of boots. He will lead a nationally distinctive team covering conservation, climate and outdoor recreation, shaping a digital-first strategy that blends breaking news, enterprise reporting and service journalism, while collaborating across the newsroom and with events and philanthropy teams to extend the paper’s reach.
“Mark is a veteran editor with more than two decades of experience leading newsrooms with a focus on innovation, enterprise reporting and staff development,” said Maria Reeve, managing editor and vice president for the Minnesota Star Tribune. “His experience directing coverage of environment and the outdoors in the Pacific Northwest translates perfectly to our outdoors-loving Minnesota audience.”
Baumgarten comes from Cascade PBS in Seattle, where he spent more than five years managing newsroom operations and guiding major projects, including a multi-newsroom collaboration examining efforts to decarbonize the Pacific Northwest. He also developed the outlet’s podcast division, oversaw the creation of its investigative desk, and helped build an ideas festival that featured interviews with former attorney general Eric Holder, then-senator Jon Tester and Ezra Klein.
Before editing, Baumgarten was a Twin Cities music journalist — a background that still shows up in the way he thinks about storytelling — and he is the author of Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. He holds bachelor’s degrees in English literature and journalism from the University of Minnesota.
The Star Tribune also noted it is continuing its search for a sports editor to lead one of the most influential sports desks in the country, a hire that will carry its own significance in a state where sports coverage still matters — deeply.
Taken together, the Bellville and Baumgarten hires reflect a newsroom making deliberate bets: on audience intelligence, on subject-matter authority, and on leadership that understands journalism doesn’t succeed just because it’s good — it succeeds because it reaches people where they actually live now.
For a 158-year-old institution, that’s not reinvention.
That’s survival done right.
. . .
SID HARTMAN, THE LATE, great Minneapolis Star Tribune sports columnist, never walked into a room quietly. He arrived like news itself — breathless, urgent, already late for the next thing — coat flapping, tie askew, eyes scanning for someone who knew something he didn’t yet. Which was almost everyone. And somehow, almost no one.
That was the trick with Hartman. He knew everybody. And yet he always made you feel like you mattered because you knew something worth hearing.
For generations of journalists and readers alike, Hartman wasn’t just a columnist. He was the switchboard. The clearinghouse. The living, breathing connective tissue of Minnesota sports and civic life for seven decades. He didn’t cover history. He helped create it by showing up early and refusing to leave.
What made Hartman great was not that he lived to 100. It was that he worked like he had 15 minutes left and a deadline breathing down his neck.
He wrote every day. Not because he had to, but because not writing would have felt like cheating the reader. Or worse, cheating himself.
He believed in the daily obligation — to show up, to make the calls, to check the facts, to stir the pot just enough to get someone talking. He believed newspapers were a public trust, and he treated them like one.
Hartman’s greatness wasn’t polish. It was proximity.
He sat close enough to power that he could smell it, but never so close that he confused access with allegiance. Coaches feared him. Owners courted him. Politicians learned quickly that dismissing Hartman was a mistake you only made once.
And yet he never acted important. He acted curious. Relentlessly curious. About games, about people, about why things worked and why they didn’t. About who was mad at whom and why it mattered. He asked questions the way other people breathe.
Hartman understood something too many journalists forget now: sports are not separate from the community. They are a mirror of it.
He covered teams, yes. But he also covered ego, ambition, failure, redemption. He understood that a coach’s temper, a player’s contract dispute, an owner’s threat to move a team — those weren’t just sports stories. They were civic stories. They affected how a city felt about itself when it woke up in the morning.
He also understood leverage. Hartman didn’t bludgeon people. He nudged them. He’d mention a name in passing, drop a quiet note of dissatisfaction, float a possibility. By the time you realized what he’d done, the conversation had already shifted.
Young reporters studied him. Old reporters measured themselves against him. In an industry that often forgets its own, Hartman extended the table without announcing it.
And then there was the work ethic, which bordered on absurd. Hartman worked when others retired. He worked when others slowed down. He worked when his body begged him not to. The notebook never closed. The phone never went unanswered. The byline never disappeared.
He made the rest of the profession uncomfortable in the best possible way.
Because if Hartman was still filing, still calling, still showing up, what excuse did anyone else have?
His legacy isn’t just the stories he wrote or the scoops he landed. It’s the standard he set. The idea that journalism is a daily act of service, not a branding exercise. That being plugged in matters. That showing up matters. That knowing your city — really knowing it — is the job.
Hartman didn’t chase clicks. He chased clarity. He chased accountability. He chased the truth as it existed at street level, locker-room level, boardroom level.
He also chased joy. Hartman loved the games. Loved the people around them. Loved the chaos. Loved the talk. He loved the simple act of sharing information, of being the guy who knew, the guy who could tell you what was really going on.
When Hartman died, Minnesota didn’t just lose a columnist. It lost a compass.
There will never be another Sid Hartman. Not because the world has changed — though it has — but because Hartman was singular. A force of will. A habit disguised as a human being. A reminder that the best journalism isn’t loud or clever or performative.
It’s present.
Hartman didn’t just chronicle Minnesota sports. He stitched together a community, one call, one column, one conversation at a time.
That’s greatness. And that legacy isn’t going anywhere.
