Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Strib Will Tout Biz Do-Gooding—For a Price
It makes sense that we learned about the Minnesota Star Tribune’s new sponsored content vertical from the most cursed social media site of them all: LinkedIn.
There, earlier this week, publisher Steve Grove shared the Strib’s plan for MN Rising, a place on the newspaper's website where corporations can make themselves look good by paying to publish sponsored stories about their community service efforts.
“To be clear, this isn't pay-to-play journalism,” Grove says. “The stories are created by our sales and marketing teams, and clearly labeled.”
And, OK, yes, the MN Rising homepage is marked as “sponsored” by a banner near the top of the page, as is every story on that vertical. Then again, there’s a tab for “MN Rising” between “Opinion” and “Obituaries” on the Star Tribune homepage. So it’s not like confusing these stories with editorial is impossible.
And whether Grove admits it or not, the possibility of confusion is part of what’s for sale here. Companies are paying for a facsimile of a news story with a Star Tribune URL.
These are tough times for news publishing, we all know, and the Strib can definitely use new income sources. But Grove and Head of Business Development Jon Christensen make clear that this isn’t just about paying the bills. Grove touts Minnesota’s culture of “business leaders gathering before the work day starts to help advise and support various community causes,” adding with regret that “often those stories don't get told.”
In a sales pitch/vertical introduction, Christensen says that after reading these stories, “I feel better about where I live. I feel prouder of where I live.”
In the news biz, advertising is traditionally a neutral platform. But here representatives of the Star Tribune, including the publisher himself, are throwing their support behind paid sponsors. This isn’t just advertising, they say in essence. It’s a genuine public service to allow Xcel Energy to publish press releases on our site.
You have to wonder, if these stories are so newsworthy on their own, why do companies have to pay the Strib to publish them?
And the bigger question is how this differs from the Strib’s regular business coverage, which has often been far from adversarial to the companies it covers. Will it continue to print puff stories for free now that they're for sale elsewhere on the site?
Crypto ATMs Are Flourishing, Scamming in MN
Mostly unregulated and easily anonymous, Crypto is the coin of choice for sex traffickers, drug cartels, money launderers, and Republican campaign donors. It’s also a growing business in Minnesota, with hundreds of one-way crypto kiosks (meaning, you put money in, but there’s no way to get it back out) popping up in liquor stores, gas stations, and grocery stores.
The amount of fraud from crypto ATMs is staggering. “Across the nation, scam victims lost $246.7 million to frauds involving cryptocurrency kiosks last year alone, according to the FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report,” writes Bill Lukitsch for the Strib. “That represented a 31% increase compared to 2023.”
While House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), founder of the Congressional Crypto Caucus, champions crypto, as does Rep. Angie Craig (DFL-MN), some lawmakers in town are looking to get rid of the ATMs.
“I’ve yet to find anybody that’s made a legitimate investment in crypto via a kiosk at a gas station or a liquor store,” Stillwater Mayor Ted Kozlowski tells Lukitsch. The city banned them in April, while places like Brooklyn Park, Forest Lake, and St. Paul are looking to further regulate the machines. Companies like Bitcoin Depot, CoinFlip, and Athena Bitcoin have their own tricks, though, and can can easily get around fraud claims by not issuing receipts and make money off of nonrefundable service fees often in the hundreds (sometimes even thousands!) per transaction.
Former Mpls Regional Chamber of Commerce President Indicted on Embezzlement Charges
Oops! A federal grand jury has indicted Jonathan Weinhagen, former Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, on charges that he stole more than $200,000 from the org. (Weinhagen made an "abrupt departure" from the chamber last year after an internal investigation found a $500K shortfall.)
We'll just go ahead and let Matt Sepic of MPR News explain the feds' allegations:
Prosecutors say that Weinhagen invented a fictional company called Synergy Partners along with a fictional owner, James Sullivan, which he used to enter into fraudulent contracts with the Chamber. According to the indictment, Weinhagen got the chamber to pay more than $100,000 to Synergy under the contracts, which he used for personal expenses. Weinhagen allegedly also opened a line of credit in the chamber’s name, borrowed more than $125,000, and transferred it to his fake company.
When the chamber discovered this credit line, staff requested information about the payments. That’s when Weinhagen allegedly sent fake emails to make it appear that the Synergy—which never existed—had gone out of business and published a fake obituary that said Sullivan—who never existed—had died of pancreatic cancer.
But wait, there's more! In May of 2021, the chamber contributed $30,000 to a Crime Stoppers fund following the shooting deaths of two local children. Weinhagen reached out a year later to ask for the money back, as the cases had gone unsolved—and according to prosecutors, he asked to have the refund check sent to his home, which he said was the chamber's new address. True lowlife behavior. (Allegedly!)
Do a little Command+f for "Jacob Frey" in that MPR story and you won't see anything, but folks on Reddit have done some digging into the Minneapolis mayor's ties to the former chamber prez. Here's one interesting example: In 2022, one year after Weinhagen is accused of stealing the $30,000, Frey lobbied for a contract in which his office would have have gotten free consulting from the Weinhagen-led chamber to “improve efficiency.” After the City Council blocked that deal, a spokeswoman for the mayor's office said it was "puzzled" by the vote. The whole situation seems rather puzzling in retrospect, doesn't it?
Weinhagen resigned today from the Mounds View School Board. Fortunately he was on the edge of the board's group photo and could easily be cropped out.
Yemeni Coffee Chain Replaces Iron Door in Lyn-Lake
The very large corner space that the Iron Door Pub abandoned in March has a new tenant. On March 1, Dustin Nelson reports for Bring Me the News, the Michigan-based company Haraz will open its first Minnesota coffee house in the 33,000-square-foot space.
A company representative told Bring Me The News, "This area is also known as Uptown, which we consider a prime part of downtown and the heart of Minneapolis."
Uh oh.
