A conversation with Chris Iles, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Chris Iles has spent much of his career working in digital marketing and communications in the world of professional sports. Now, as the vice president of communications and brand marketing at The Minnesota Star Tribune, Iles has taken what he’s learned from baseball teams and tech startups and helped guide a legacy news organization as it redefines itself as a statewide digital-first outlet.

While the Tribune’s rebranding has been a major shift, Iles shared some lessons about how news organizations can start to tell their own stories and increase their brand awareness.

Dolan: What are some important things that you consider when rebranding or raising brand awareness for your news organization?

Iles: You want to understand what your value proposition is. First and foremost, you need to know what value you provide to people. And you can do that a couple different ways: You probably start with an educated guess on what it is. And then you can qualify that by going out and just talking to people.

Understanding what you’re competing with is certainly helpful as well. We’re competing with anything anyone is spending their discretionary time, income and attention on. That could be Netflix, a trampoline park subscription for kids — really anything that is going to take someone’s attention away. All that is helpful for understanding what space you have to play in. I think guardrails and constraints are actually a good thing because it helps you narrow your focus much more quickly.

Dolan: What are some specific strategies you use when trying to raise brand awareness?

Iles: A strategy that we leaned heavily into was owned media and earned media. There’s a unique PR challenge in doing PR for a media outlet because a lot of other media outlets just see you as competition. But that was one of the things that they brought me on for. We’ve got a building full of storytellers that are excellent at telling everyone else’s stories, but no one has ever focused on telling the story of The Minnesota Star Tribune. And we happen to have a really unique and exciting story to tell at the moment that goes against the conventional wisdom and everything that you’re reading about the media industry right now, which is a prime opportunity for earned media. So we had a pretty steady drumbeat of things that we talked about and were doing press releases on – everything from who the reporters are that we’re hiring out in Greater Minnesota to announcing a partnership with Code and Theory, the tech firm that helped us rebuild the website and mobile app.

Dolan: Beyond a national level of communicating this story, how are you communicating this to your community in Minnesota?

Iles: There are a bunch of different ways. One, we are the largest news organization in the Midwest, so we use our owned and operated channels. We have physically been getting out and visiting communities and sitting down and having conversations with people, which goes a long way. We’ve really ramped up our newsletter efforts, so we’ve been communicating with the people that opt into our newsletters pretty consistently. 

Dolan: So how do you encourage people within the newsroom to tell the story of the Minnesota Star Tribune?

Iles: One way is having a steady cadence of getting in front of everyone and making sure everyone’s up to speed. And for things that are significant or that people have the potential to get questions about, we’ll do an internal FAQ document. Like we’re about to launch a philanthropy effort, so we’ve pulled together an FAQ doc that we’ll distribute to all employees as they get questions like, “Aren’t you owned by a billionaire?” So people are equipped with the talking points that they need to be able to effectively answer questions.

Dolan: Can you talk a little bit more about the listening sessions that you mentioned? What do those look like, and what are you trying to learn from those?

Iles: We show up in a community and reach out to subscribers, lapsed subscribers and community members that we just happen to know through personal connections. We invite them to a venue. There’s usually some food and light beverages included. And we basically have a conversation. Our publisher and editors show up to the vast majority of these. We say, this is what we’re doing: We are expanding to Greater Minnesota, and we want to get your thoughts on that. And in the second half, we break off into smaller roundtable discussions, with tables of 5 to 7 people with a Star Tribune staffer at each table to facilitate conversation and take notes. We ask two questions: How should we be showing up in your community and what stories are being told? Or, more importantly, what stories are not being told? And what would you like to see our coverage of your area look like? 

Dolan: How do media outlets market? How do we communicate who we are to an audience?

Iles: Communication is like a pretty simple endeavor, right? You’ve got to tell your story in a consistent manner. Newsrooms have storytellers coming out their ears. You just need to focus on telling your own story. You need someone who’s willing to brag, because, if you don’t think you’re the best, no one else is going to. You have to tell your story in a clean and consistent manner, not just once. If you do that, you’re able to build credibility. It’s only a matter of time before someone else starts to pick up on it. And once you get that third party media credibility, then you’re set. 

Dolan: What does it look like to start a new relationship with a new community that hasn’t been covered in the past? And what does it look like to work to maintain that new relationship?

Iles: I think it starts with having boots on the ground in those communities. We’ve hired somewhere between six and 10 reporters out in the community that are part of these markets. We’ve hired ad sellers that are living in these communities. People don’t want to hear from you if they know you’re not part of the community. I would say first and foremost, it starts with showing up and being a part of the community.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Dolan, Olivia (2025, Jan. 8). How to start telling the story of your newsroom’s brand. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/how-to-start-telling-the-story-of-your-newsrooms-brand/