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.

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 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 does 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, and we need 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. Major foundation support has come from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Blandin Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Otto Bremer Foundation. As of August 2010, MinnPost had 2,100 member-donors contributing amounts ranging from $10 to $20,000 a year.
 
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; Jennifer Martin, Chair of the Martin and Brown Foundation; Chris (Oshikata) Widdess, managing director at Penumbra Theatre Company; Judy Blaseg, fund-raising consultant; Tobin J. Dayton, president and CEO of JobDig; Rebecca Shavlik, former COO of Shavlik Technologies, a security software firm; Wendy Blackshaw, Vice President of Marketing, Sun Country Airlines; Fran Davis, REALTOR and Sales Manager, Coldwell Banker Burnet; Jack Dempsey, President of the Filtration Solutions Global Business, Pentair, Inc.; Kandace Olsen, vice president of communications and human resources, Great River Energy; Jeremy Edes Pierotti, Principal and Owner of Validus Consulting, a health-care management consulting firm; and broadcast journalist Fred De Sam Lazaro, director of the Project for Under-Told Stories at St. John's University in Collegeville. Founding donor John Cowles is director emeritus.

Joel Kramer, Editor and CEO of MinnPost

I got involved with newspapers early in life — I delivered Newsday in Queens, N.Y., 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 2007, 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. In August, 2010, one of my sons, Elias Kramer, accepted a position as deputy policy director of the gubernatorial campaign of Mark Dayton.

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 three 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.

Susan Albright, Managing Editor

You could call me an accidental journalist. After college, where I happily studied English literature and music history and performance, it occurred to me that I was interested in too many disparate things to proceed down the ever-narrowing Ph.D. path to specialization in William Blake’s symbolism or Mozart’s German operas. I saw this as a weakness, but my husband-to-be encouraged me to think of wide-ranging curiosity as an asset — one that could be very useful in journalism.

After a journalism master's degree, three decades and several jobs later, I’m not looking back. The English and music backgrounds have served me well; but I’ve loved the public-service mission, the variety and the fast pace, the ever-changing nature and the tuned-in quality of journalism.

Until late 2007 I’d spent the previous 22 years on the opinion side of journalism — the "Ivory Tower," as those in the newsroom liked to call it. At the Star Tribune from 1993 to 2007, I led a staff of editorial writers, op-ed editors and a cartoonist; during that time we launched a Sunday section, instituted several online innovations, and collectively traveled to 38 countries for special writing projects. I led the 600-member National Conference of Editorial Writers in 1999, served on two Pulitzer juries, taught at the American Press Institute and occasionally spoke about public policy on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and “All Things Considered.”

From 1986 to 1993 I was editorial page editor at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Ariz. My own journalistic travel as an opinion writer and editor took me through six Eastern European countries and to Russia, China, Taiwan and Singapore. Before all this I variously managed an arts and features copy desk, wrote the occasional op-ed, led special news projects, wrote book and restaurant reviews, and edited national and international copy for three different newspapers in Tucson, Louisville and Syracuse.

As I may have mentioned, I love variety.

At MinnPost, it’s an adventure and a delight to continuously do new things, but still within journalism. Online writing and editing is humbling — there’s ALWAYS something new to learn, from Twitter to Google Analytics to — well, who knows? Learning all the time, writing, editing, collaborating with colleagues on stories and projects — it’s my definition of a meaningful life.

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, News 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.

In December 2006, 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.

Sally Waterman, Director of Advertising

Sally has been in advertising sales for more than 18 years, including a decade in online advertising that started at America Online/Digital Cities Twin Cities. She came to MinnPost from the position of Manager, Business Development at CarSoup.com in Bloomington, MN. Sally previously was an Interactive Media Account Executive at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, and before that was an Interactive Media Sales Consultant for startribune.com.

Sally is in charge of online advertising for MinnPost.com, overseeing advertising strategy and production, customer service and promotions. She is a graduate of St. Cloud State University, and lives in Northeast Minneapolis.

Laurie Kramer, Chief Revenue Officer

My journalism career started when I was a sophomore in high school and stopped when I graduated from college. Not much to talk about — though as managing editor of the high school paper I did work closely with the editor, a serious fellow named Joel Kramer.

Almost 40 years after marrying him, I was open to the idea of co-founding MinnPost, putting in some of our own money, and working for the enterprise — mostly on the business side.

My career before MinnPost was in the nonprofit sector, with various amounts of time spent in writing, editing, fundraising, membership, marketing, programming and supervisory positions at the Guggenheim Foundation, Consumers Union, New York State Consumer Protection Board, Jewish Community Centers in Buffalo (N.Y.) and St. Paul, and a few other places along the way.

In 1998 I began a Masters of Public Health program at the U of M. After finishing the program in 2001, I raised money and support for a new Mental Health Education Project sponsored by the Twin Cities Jewish community. The project received various awards and I was recognized as one of Blue Cross Blue Shield of MN's Champions of Health in 2003. 

As MinnPost’s demands on my time increased, I resigned as director of the Mental Health Education Project. But I continue to organize the project’s annual conference, which will celebrate its 10^th anniversary in 2010. My volunteer work in the Twin Cities has primarily focused on mental health issues.

At MinnPost I wear many hats. The events are the most fun. And I’m always looking for help: lkramer@minnpost.com.

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