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The Minneapolis Star Tribune finally dropped the training wheels. It’s the Minnesota Star Tribune now. Should’ve done it years ago. Everyone knew they were the statewide paper. They were just too polite to say it.
Meanwhile, the little weeklies have been dying like mosquitoes in October. Print isn’t limping — it’s flatlined. You can’t staff a city hall beat on garage-sale ads. One big statewide voice is the only voice left.
The money? Simple. Stop duplicating the same junk in six newsrooms. One ad team, one paywall, one editing desk. Less overhead, more reporters. It’s not romance, it’s survival.
And print? Forget it. That’s a souvenir now. A weekend luxury. The real game is online. Homepage is A1, push alerts are the bulldog. If you’re still writing for “tomorrow’s paper,” tomorrow already left you behind.
Then Apple waltzes in, uninvited, with the knockout punch. Remember the hotspot? That miserable little parasite that drained your phone and crashed right when you needed it? Good riddance. A MacBook with 5G means the laptop is the phone. Always online. No tether, no excuses.
That changes the news game. Mayor busted at 11 a.m.? The story’s in your lap by 11:01. No waiting to get home on Wi-Fi. No losing readers to Twitter. Your laptop is the newsstand.
Ads look better, too. A plumber, a supper club, a car dealer — finally not squashed into a four-inch coffin at the bottom of your phone. Real estate they’ll pay for.
The danger? Acting like Minneapolis owns the state. If you wear “Minnesota” on the masthead, you'd better have boots in Worthington, Duluth, Bemidji, Rochester, and the Range. Not parachutes. Not stringers. Reporters who live it.
But this is the moment. Print is dead. The hotspot is dead. Readers are chained to their screens. The Star Tribune plants the flag now or watches somebody else do it.
So bury the hotspot with AOL discs and dial-up tones. And tip your glass — the Minnesota Star Tribune finally showed up. Took ‘em decades, but hey, they made it.
