This post is for all you MinnesotaBrown readers who have stuck with me. I know things have changed since I took the new job at the Minnesota Star Tribune. A decade ago I was a veritable fire hose of Iron Range news and analysis. Then I started focusing on columns and long-form essays, and now my columns appear in a newspaper with a paywall. 

After I took the new job in March, a lot changed right away. I’m no longer holding down the proverbial “day job.” The commentary I passionately scribbled during my down time and late nights is now the substance of each work day. This has granted me much more time to conduct interviews and visit places. Doing so opened up a wide variety of new topics for my columns, but also invigorated those columns with new perspective.

The Iron Range remains the thematic heart of everything I do. I say this, even though a lot of people on the Range weren’t very happy when I took the Strib job. My news dropped around the time labor and political leaders from the region condemned the paper for its coverage of environmental and mining issues.

Times I’ve written about local Iron Range issues, I have been greeted with a new phenomenon — people who just see that the link goes to the Star Tribune, and assume that I’m from the Cities. Others who know where I’m from have accused me of “selling out” to “profit” off my writing.

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Naturally, my instinct is to start reciting my biography. Some of you know the story. I grew up on a junkyard in Zim. My family mined iron ore for generations. I have always lived on the Iron Range. I spend more time here than most Range big shots and, for that matter, most miners, even after taking this new job.

What happened to striving? What happened to achieving dreams? I had a dream to write columns about the place and people I love, full time and with no editorial restraint. I took the chance to do that when I could. Anyway, it’s easy to get defensive. You will note that my core values remain unchanged. I’m a working man, not a company man. If you don’t know the difference, that’s a you problem.

What I really want to say is that the numbers back me up. When I started my Strib column, I kept track of every source I talked to and place I visited on a map (below). Each pin represents a place I visited in person or a phone call with a person from a place about a local story in 2025.

As you can see, my stories and sourcing remain strongly tied to northern Minnesota. That won’t change. I was at Star Tribune HQ five times in 2025, including the job interview. Each time I retreated back to the 218 area code to sleep at night.

I do hope to expand this map, however. I look forward to getting up to the border and over to Northwestern Minnesota more in 2026. There are holes on the map that I aim to fill in coming months. More places. More topics.

This will be a momentous year on the Iron Range. I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’m preparing to write a meaningful series about how this big, big world interacts with our little place.

Columns start conversations. That’s why newspapers have run them since there have been newspapers. To start better conversations, you have to tell people something new or interesting. Getting around the state helps me do this.

This is often where I would share my “top posts” of the previous year, highlighting my most-read or impactful writing from 2025. I meant to write that post again, but kept finding other things to do. Then I kept seeing other writers share their year-end posts and realized that I didn’t really care to read them. On one hand, it was nice to see a repository of things I might have missed, but on the other I had no time to catch up with everything.

Same for you, right? So I am skipping the year-ender post. I will take the opportunity to brag that three of my columns made the top 25 most-read opinion articles in the Star Tribune last year, including the #1 column of the year. The column in question was about fabric stores. Many of my most researched and most important columns were nowhere near the top. The world is weird, and popularity isn’t always the right thing to chase. I have found that if I keep doing original stuff, people find it eventually.

If you like what I do, I have an easy, medium and hard request for you.

Easy: Subscribe for free to my MinnesotaBrown e-mail list. After every column, I write a blog post introducing that column with a gift link to the column in the Star Tribune. The link expires after two weeks, but if you want to read all my columns, you can.

The media business is a harsh mistress. I could get shit-canned, and if I do I will be right back here at MinnesotaBrown continuing programming without interruption. The e-mail list is precious, and I protect it from spam and overuse.

Medium: I know money is tight and I know you might have reasons not to, but I would invite you to subscribe to the Minnesota Star Tribune. A great time to do it is when you want to read one of my columns and hit the paywall. They invested in letting me stay in northern Minnesota to write columns because they want to be a statewide newspaper. For the Strib to truly become a statewide newspaper, they need statewide subscriptions.

A digital subscription is a great value. You get a lot of news for the money, including access to features that are really useful and fun. Big news often appears first at the Star Tribune, and in-depth coverage is far better than anything you’ll get for free on Facebook. You can share the subscription within your family, which is how one of my teenage sons became a daily news reader. With Strib Varsity access you’ll be able to follow prep sports statewide. Northern Minnesota teams are frequently featured and ranked.

When you’re a subscriber you can just go to my author page at StarTribune.com and read whatever you want, whenever you want.

Hard: OK, maybe not too hard, but I know it’s a big ask. Ask your friends and followers to do the Easy and Medium things. Get them to subscribe to the e-mail list for MinnesotaBrown.com. Forward and share my columns as often as you are willing. Social media is becoming more toxic every year. I don’t know what will happen to print media, but we must find a way to improve and civilize digital media. Real people need to share good, thoughtful stuff with other real people. I sometimes wonder if this ends with me printing a broadsheet in my garage with a manual printing press. If it does, I’m OK with that.

Words that matter. Words that last.

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One postscript: I have been making good progress on the book edits of late, and will have more to share on that in a future post.