About Us

MinnPost is a nonprofit journalism enterprise that publishes MinnPost.com.

Our mission is to provide high-quality journalism for news-intense people who care about Minnesota. We intend to focus sharply on that mission, and not get distracted by trying to be all things or serve all people.

MinnPost.com provides news and analysis Monday through Friday, based on reporting by professional journalists, most of whom have decades of experience in the Twin Cities media. The site features high-quality video and audio, as well as written stories. It also includes commentary pieces from the community, and comments from readers on individual stories. The site will not endorse candidates for office or publish unsigned editorials representing an institutional position. We encourage broad-ranging, civil discussion from many points of view.

Our goal is to create a sustainable business model for this kind of journalism, supported by corporate sponsors, advertisers, and members who make annual donations. High-quality journalism is a community asset that sustains democracy and quality of life, so we are asking people who believe in it to support our work.

MinnPost's initial funding of $850,000 came from four families: John and Sage Cowles, Lee Lynch and Terry Saario, Joel and Laurie Kramer, and David and Vicki Cox. Roy Karon became a fifth founding donor. Major foundation support has come from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (start-up funding, 2007 and 2008) and the Blandin Foundation (funding to launch the Greater Minnesota Project, 2008-2010). As of June 30, 2008, MinnPost had 904 member-donors contributing amounts ranging from $10 to $10,000.

The CEO and Editor of MinnPost is Joel Kramer, former editor and then publisher of Star Tribune.  Other members of the MinnPost board of directors are founding donors David Cox and Lee Lynch; Kathleen Hansen, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota; Patrick Irestone, CEO of Meritide; John Satorius, of the law firm Fredrikson & Byron; Vernae Hasbargen, former executive director of the Minnesota Rural Education Association; Samuel Heins, of the law firm Heins Mills & Olson; Mark Lindsay, national vice president for strategic business development for the Public Sector Group of United Health Care; Jennifer Martin, Chair of the Martin and Brown Foundation; and Chris (Oshikata) Widdess, managing director at Penumbra Theatre Company. Founding donor John Cowles is director emeritus.

MinnPost in Print was published five days a week, and presented highlights from the website in a PDF that you can print. The last issue was published 7/25/2008.

Joel Kramer, Editor and CEO of MinnPost

I got involved with newspapers early in life — I delivered Newsday in Queens, NY, when I was 12 years old. I was the editor of both my high school and college newspapers, and then worked as a writer or editor for Science Magazine, Newsday and the Buffalo Courier-Express.

I moved to Minneapolis in 1983 to become editor of the Star Tribune, and in 1992 I was named publisher and president. I held that position until 1998, when the newspaper was sold to McClatchy. Then I spent three years as a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

While I never had any involvement in political life during my journalism career, in 2002 Becky Lourey asked me to be her running mate in her unsuccessful attempt to win the DFL nomination for governor at the state convention. My political career lasted six weeks. Among the things I learned was that I'm not cut out for running for office.

In 2003, I started a think tank called Growth & Justice, focusing on state policy that simultaneously creates economic growth, does so sustainably, and shares the fruits of the growth broadly. I served as executive director until this spring, when I became board chair.

During the decade after leaving the Star Tribune, I made campaign contributions to a number of Democratic candidates, locally and nationally. However, when I got serious about launching MinnPost this spring, I stopped making such contributions. My political views are generally liberal, though I often had some of my most spirited debates during my Growth & Justice days with Democrats when they took policy positions that I did not believe were supported by the evidence.

On the civic front, I served as chair of the board of the Children's Theatre Company in the mid-1990s, and more recently as board chair of Achieve!Minneapolis, which galvanizes community support for public education in Minneapolis. My wife, Laurie, was recently chair of the board of the Mental Health Association of Minnesota, and is currently president of the Smith Club of Minnesota. Laurie and I are members of the 1% Club, which means we promise to contribute 1% of our net worth every year to philanthropic causes.

We do not own individual stocks in our investment portfolio — only mutual funds and bonds. We are investors in Minnesota Jewish Media, a private partnership that owns American Jewish World, a local newspaper for the Jewish Community. I also serve as chair of the MJM board.

Laurie and I are members of Shir Tikvah Congregation in South Minneapolis. We have three sons, all grown, 2 daughters-in-law and two grandchildren.

Roger Buoen, Managing Editor

Until recently every paycheck I had ever received came from a newspaper, starting with the Minneapolis Star, a now-defunct afternoon newspaper I delivered one summer as a kid. From that point on my employers were newspaper owners. I worked as a copy aide for the Minneapolis Tribune while on summer break during college, became a reporter for several small weekly and daily papers after graduation and later landed an editing position at the Star, which eventually merged with the Tribune to become today's Star Tribune.

Over the next 27 years I worked a number of jobs at the newspaper: assistant city editor, special projects reporter, Sunday editor, national editor, assistant managing editor, deputy managing editor. I spent a lot of time being an assistant or a deputy.

I've also spent a lot of time in Minnesota. I was born and raised here, and I have lived most of my life in the state except for attending college in Evanston, Ill., and living in Washington, D.C., to do an internship covering Congress while in graduate school. I also attended law school in Minnesota, passed the state bar exam in 1980, but stuck to newspaper work and never practiced law.

Most newspapers prohibit journalists from participating in politics in any form, and I followed that rule while working as a journalist. I left the Star Tribune in 2005 to do other things, and was hired by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Independent Media to mentor bloggers who write for minnesotamonitor.com. During the period I was not working as a journalist, I contributed to several Democratic candidates running for national and state offices. Now that I'm back in journalism as MinnPost.com's managing editor, I'll follow the practice of staying away from politics.

Still, there's politics in my immediate family. One of my sons is a political consultant for Democratic candidates and officeholders.

I am married to Cynthia Boyd, a former reporter for the Pioneer Press who writes for MinnPost.com.

Karl Pearson-Cater, Director of Operations

Karl Pearson-Cater brings 11+ years of interactive development experience to MinnPost.com, most recently working at StarTribune.com as the product management supervisor in the Digital Media Business Development group.  Previous to that, he managed all aspects of web systems and business development for CityPages.com from 1997-2006 as web director.

Corey Anderson, Web Editor

Corey Anderson moved to the Twin Cities in 1987 to attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he received a B.F.A. in Visual Communications. After a six-year stint at City Pages during the 1990s, he left to work in the E-Commerce division of Conseco Finance just as the internet bubble burst (good call), followed by a stint as art director/production manager of The Rake, where he received two Minnesota Magazine & Publishers Association Publishing Excellence Awards in 2002. He returned to City Pages in 2003 as the marketing creative director before moving to the online managing editor position in the fall of 2004. Anderson joined MinnPost in August 2007. His satirical pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Post, Newsday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Tampa Tribune, Defamer, and Wonkette. He lives in St. Paul with his girlfriend and a 14-pound cat named Chloe. His 10-year stint as a volunteer board member of the non-partisan Snelling Hamline Community Council drew to a close on December 31, 2007.

Corey manages our @MinnPostNow Twitter profile.

Don Effenberger, Editor

My fate was sealed at the tender age of 7, when I received a silver, red and blue toy typewriter for Christmas and also spent many a half-hour sprawled on the floor in front of our tiny black-and-white TV raptly following the weekly "Adventures of Superman."

Being an exceptionally astute child, I quickly figured out that my career path should follow in the footsteps of Clark Kent, rather than the muscle-bound Man of Steel.

And I've never regretted the decision — well, hardly ever.

In no time, it seems, I graduated from my turn-the-wheel, one-letter-at-a-time typewriter to work on my high school paper and college yearbook. A St. Paul native, I graduated from the then College of St. Thomas with a journalism degree and the completion of a two-year reporting internship at the Catholic Bulletin, then the state's largest weekly newspaper. Folks there asked me to stay on. From age 19, I had the chance to cover some of the big controversies of the time — legislative battles over abortion and state aid to parochial schools, state Supreme Court rulings, Catholic involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements and the biggest Catholic story in state history — Bishop James Shannon's decision to resign his post in disagreement with the church's birth-control policy.

After several years as news editor at the Bulletin, I moved down Cathedral Hill to the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press. There, I handled a wide range of editing assignments over 28 years, such as supervising coverage of religion, education, health, St. Paul and Ramsey County news and a wide array of special projects. Between longevity and attrition, I became one of the de facto newsroom "historians": in part because of several favorite career projects. I got the chance to edit and design the company history book and to oversee our yearlong coverage of the paper's 150th anniversary (the Pioneer Press' forerunner, the Minnesota Pioneer, is the state's oldest paper!).

I also had the true privilege of working as columnist Don Boxmeyer's editor on and off for nearly 20 years.

Last December, I took a voluntary buyout when the company went through the first painful round of cutbacks. Even so, my connections to the paper continue through my wife, Pat, who, as communications manager, works on community partnerships with many nonprofit groups, including the St. Paul public library system and St. Paul public schools.

Pat and I now live in Maplewood, a mere three blocks outside the city limits. We have two grown daughters living on opposite coasts — a property development manager in New York City and a first-grade teacher in Seattle — both great places to visit.

Casey Selix, News Editor

Since taking a voluntary buyout from the Pioneer Press in December 2006, Casey Selix has not run for public office or donated to any political parties. She recalls signing a Planned Parenthood petition at an art fair, something she never would have done while employed full time as a journalist.

The former assistant business editor also worked about 10 hours a week as a copy editor for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Independent Media, which runs citizen journalism websites including minnesotamonitor.com. Wading through HTML coding was good training for her new job at MinnPost.

Casey's career has been divided between editing and writing, and she brings that split personality to MinnPost as a news editor and writer. She was born in Illinois, but grew up an Army brat in far-flung places from Okinawa to Eritrea. Before moving to Minnesota from Texas in 1994, she had no idea what a DFL or an IR was. Casey's crash course in state politics occurred after the Minnesota Women's Press asked her to write a story on how Julie Quist morphed from radical feminist to conservative Republican and spouse of an IR-endorsed gubernatorial candidate named Allen.

Besides the Pioneer Press and the Women's Press, Casey's stories and/or essays have appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Houston Post, Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press and Newsweek. She lives in St. Paul with her son.

Beth Thibodeau, Web Production Assistant

Beth Thibodeau got her start in journalism at a summer camp sponsored by the South Dakota High School Press Association at South Dakota State University, her alma mater. In college she spent two summers as an intern — first at a weekly paper in Wisconsin and then at a financial magazine in Taiwan. She worked at the Star Tribune for 14 years writing and editing stories and designing pages for the paper's features sections. Her dream of becoming a hard-hitting crime reporter came true — sort of — when she made a donation to MinnPost to qualify as a Founding Member at the Night Police Reporter level.

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