Amid a federal immigration crackdown that’s produced widespread allegations of law enforcement misconduct and resulted in the high-profile deaths of two US citizens, the state of a local news publisher’s advertising business can seem inconsequential.
But the Minnesota Star Tribune has to deal with how its duty to keep the public informed impacts its monetization potential.
The publication has been doggedly reporting against a backdrop of ongoing unrest in Minnesota due to the presence of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who have ramped up deportation operations throughout the state. The Star Tribune also sued the city of Minneapolis on January 29 over its failure to produce information related to misconduct complaints against Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.
As you might expect, these stories have driven a spike in attention to the Star Tribune’s journalism. But, also as you might expect, the coverage triggered a wave of brand-safety decisions that have affected the publication’s ad revenue.
“Our revenue took a hit on the direct side, despite traffic being way up,” confirmed Brian Kennett, VP and head of digital advertising and agency services at the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Proactive protections
However, rather than this revenue hit being the result of overzealous brand-safety blocking, it was actually the result of proactive protections the Star Tribune put in place for its direct advertiser clients.
As coverage of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents killing Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti ramped up, concerned citizens around the country latched onto the stories. The Star Tribune’s pageviews exploded. But Kennett said he didn’t want clients’ ads showing up next to coverage of shootings. On pages carrying especially sensitive breaking coverage, he paused campaigns entirely.
Kennett made these choices in the context of a broader economic strain impacting the regional business community and local ad budgets. Many Minneapolis-based businesses have been struggling in recent years, he said, with some closing altogether or operating through major disruptions.
In a purely local ad-based model, the combination of campaign pauses plus weakened small business budgets could have been devastating.
But because of its diversified demand base, the Star Tribune wasn’t solely reliant on the health of downtown storefronts. Its larger advertisers helped offset the hit to local direct sales revenue when brand safety required restricting ads on its most popular stories.
Demand diversification
About 80% of the Star Tribune’s advertising revenue is now digital, with print making up the remaining 20%, Kennett said. Of that digital slice of the pie, roughly three-quarters comes from agency services, including campaign planning, media buying and strategy. Kennett manages about $40 million a year in client ad spend, backed by a 55-person non-sales team of buyers and strategists.
On StarTribune.com, revenue is roughly 60% direct vs. 40% indirect and programmatic. Direct dollars come from sponsorships, custom content and brand partnerships; programmatic fills most of the run-of-site inventory and adds reach for direct deals.
The client mix is also diversified. The Star Tribune’s top 20 advertisers are regional or national in scope, with an average digital client spend of around $200,000 a year. But a handful of those accounts are investing between $2 million and $4 million annually, Kennett said. Meanwhile, many of the smaller local businesses have nowhere near those budgets.
What unites these clients is geography and mission. The “overwhelming majority” have some kind of Minnesota tie, Kennett said, and he’s explicit about why that matters.
“Our purpose is to fund local journalism,” he said. He emphasizes to each client that every dollar they spend pays Minnesota-based reporters.
That pitch tends to land with advertisers. Kennett said the Star Tribune has a 92% client retention rate.
And because the Star Tribune embraces its ties to the community, some advertisers even reached out unprompted to ask how they could help keep the publication’s coverage going when the news turned ugly.
“We’ve had clients increase spend or move some spend over, because they do care and they do know that it makes a difference,” Kennett said.
Thanks to this support from its advertisers, the Star Tribune finished January up year over year in revenue despite pausing ads in sensitive placements, Kennett said. The agency services business also helped fill in the gap from lost ad revenue, he added.
Brand safety for hard news
Still, keeping those relationships intact requires more than turning campaigns off when necessary.
At the Star Tribune, brand safety starts with the basics: keyword filters and internal protocols that screen out clearly unsafe terms and scenarios.
But Kennett and his team are moving beyond blunt blocklists. With funding from an OpenAI grant, the Star Tribune has been developing sentiment analysis tools that can read the tone and context of coverage, not just the words on the page.
The idea is to separate hard breaking news from the follow-up context that advertisers may actually want to align with, Kennett said. For example, a next-day explainer on changes in city policy in response to law enforcement and protest activity might include many of the same keywords as a breaking piece from a chaotic demonstration, but with far fewer brand-safety risks.
Kennett described a three-layer system that includes keyword filters, AI-driven sentiment analysis and a human in the loop. The person is there to step in when Slack alerts from the newsroom signal that “something really bad” is happening, Kennett said. Human oversight also reassures advertisers that someone is actually paying attention to where their messages appear, he added.
Still, not every advertiser will be swayed by a news publisher’s brand safety approach, and Kennett is realistic about that fact.
The type of advertiser who is fundamentally uncomfortable with news wouldn’t buy directly on the Star Tribune’s site in the first place, he said. And when Kennett does work with such brands on the agency services side, he uses the publication’s first-party data to reach audiences elsewhere, rather than forcing the issue.
However, selling clients on the news still often means explaining basics that journalists take for granted: the difference between reported news and opinion. The fact that a guest column doesn’t necessarily represent the view of the paper. The firewall between the newsroom and the business side. And how important it is to fund local news if citizens want reporters parked outside City Hall, holding public officials accountable.
“There’s a huge lack of news literacy in our country,” Kennet said, “and that extends to ad buyers.”
