The Minnesota Star Tribune's Journey from Legacy Paper to Digital News Leader

The pivot to digital among legacy news publications has become a familiar story in the media industry. But few publications have made a digital transformation so quickly, aggressively, and successfully as The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Started in 1867, the Star Tribune is the largest news organization in the upper Midwest, with one of the highest daily circulation rates in the U.S. The Star Tribune’s new publisher Steve Grove, who came from a technology background, knew that the paper needed to double down on digital efforts to succeed in the new landscape. Grove hired the paper’s first Chief Product Officer, Aron Pilhofer, to lead the paper’s digital transformation.

“This isn’t about digital first,” said Pilhofer. “It’s literally about changing our business from the ground up to be just digital. We realized the tools of our platform were not fit for purpose — and our print organization was going to die if we didn’t move to an aggressively digital focus.”

The paper would undergo this transformation during an election year, while also refreshing their brand identity and expanding to state-wide and regional coverage.

The stakes were high, but the goals were even higher. The north star behind the Star Tribune’s digital effort was an ambitious vision: increasing digital subscriptions by 200% over the next five years.

Challenge: Rebuilding the Tech Stack for the Digital Era

The existing technical team at the Star Tribune consisted of five product managers and a handful of engineers — a small size for a team tasked with such a massive digital overhaul.

Before Pilhofer joined, the organization had a “build not buy” mindset when it came to technology. The team was maintaining a large number of custom-built tools, and every piece of the tech stack from login to paywall was developed and maintained internally. The already small team was spending too much time maintaining these custom tools to focus on building new features or innovating beyond their current stack.

“It became apparent the problems were deeper than a redesign or rebrand,” said Pilhofer. “We had to totally re-platform.”

Solution: Better Experiences with new Tools

For six months, the team worked to “rip out every stitch” of the existing technology stack and implement more modern, flexible solutions. Arc XP would be the foundation of the new toolset, serving as the central hub for all content. The Star Tribune team also implemented other solutions like Norkon, Pugpig, and Piano to supplement the end-user experiences.

The team also went from an outdated PHP-based framework to a next.JS/React site — which allowed developers to build and deploy faster. They are also building their own data warehouse and proper CDP solution, which will allow the publication to build stronger relationships with their audience in the future.

Here are some of the solutions that made the Star Tribune’s transformation a success:

Headless Implementation of Arc XP

The team chose a headless implementation to retain additional control over their front-end experience. With a new brand identity, it was important that the development team could customize and configure the appearance of the website — and have the flexibility to create and adjust unique experiences as needed.

“We made the right call to stay headless when we moved to Arc XP,” said Pilhofer. “It has worked really well, and Arc has not been a problem for our team.”

To power the headless implementation, developers leveraged Arc XP’s Integration Framework (IFX) to quickly build custom integrations.

Liveblogging with Norkon

To support election and sports coverage, The Star Tribune partnered with Norkon to power liveblogging on their site. Their solution allows journalists to add content in Arc XP, then Norkon renders the content on the site via an integration with Arc.

According to Pilhofer, the liveblogging tools helped increase reader engagement during high-traffic news events. Also, the Norkon and Arc XP integration “helped a lot” with newsroom adoption and lowered the barrier to launch, because journalists could easily add content in Arc XP without learning a new tool.

Mobile Experiences with Pugpig

Partnering with Pugpig allowed the Star Tribune to quickly build the “best possible” mobile solution and reach a wider audience as a major regional news source.

Before the digital transformation project, the previous iteration of the mobile app would often crash and provided an unreliable experience for users — but it was typically an afterthought for a team already hard pressed for time and drowning in maintenance work. With Star Tribune coverage expanding to become a more regional publication, building a reliable app with a standout user experience was critical to keep new and existing readers engaged.

“The app should feel luxurious,” said Pilhofer. “The app should feel like a reward for being a subscriber. It should feel special.”

Partnering with Pugpig allowed the Star Tribune to quickly build the “best possible” solution and reach a wider audience as a major regional news source.

Moving at the Speed of News

According to Pilhofer, speed played heavily into the decision of which vendors to partner with on digital transformation initiatives. The Star Tribune aimed to partner with providers that could implement quickly to help them start working toward ambitious goals and be up and running for election season.

Results: Launching into the National Spotlight

The Star Tribune was able to launch their new site over the summer, in time for the peak traffic of election coverage in the fall. But the team didn’t expect what would happen next.

When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as the surprise VP pick on the Democratic presidential ticket, traffic spiked far beyond the team’s expectations. The regional publication was now seeing traffic from across the country, as readers tried to learn more about the relatively unknown politician.

“Nothing crashed, which was both a delight and a relief!” said Pilhofer.

While the traffic increases from Walz’s campaign were partially due to luck, the Star Tribune was prepared and able to make the most of it. The publication got to introduce itself to a wider audience, supporting their goals of becoming a regional news source for the upper Midwest. Pilhofer and his team were also able to prove themselves: the new tech stack was more reliable and scalable than the previous stack. In the digital era, any story can go viral or become national news — and The Star Tribune proved that they will be prepared for those scenarios.

Internally, Arc XP was key to newsroom adoption. Having one centralized tool for all content creation helped journalists work more effectively, and they appreciated the move to a more modern tool.

“From the newsroom standpoint, it made it much more usable for them,” said Pilhofer. “It lowered the barrier for us to launch.”

Moving Forward: A Foundation for Growth

While Pilhofer and team are happy with the rollout of the new tech stack — as well as the record-breaking traffic they saw this year — they are still focused on the Star Tribune’s overarching goal: growth.

“2024 was a year of ripping out the old stuff and putting in the foundation for the future,” said Pilhofer. “2025 is when the fun, difficult stuff happens. This is where we start thinking about the growth opportunities and product-led opportunities we have to continue to grow.”