Images courtesy Key Enterprises (magazines, portraits); Shutterstock/Roman Belogorodov (computer); Getty/Ron Galella, Ltd. (Hartnett); Sara Rubinstein (Moskowitz Grumdahl); Shutterstock/Thyrymn2 (witch’s hat)
eight images from the timeline
1972
Zibeta magazine cover
Zibeta hits the scene—a downtown Minneapolis where-to-go-and-what-to-see magazine—including skin flicks because, well, ’70s gonna ’70s. After five issues, founding owner/editor/publisher James Roberts changes the name to MPLS.
1978
Burt Cohen
Burt Cohen, a respected former New York Times manager, buys the mag—now called Mpls. He promises his wife, Rusty, he’ll take the magazine’s young editor, Brian Anderson, and sales manager, Gary Johnson, to lunch at Charlie’s Cafe and fire them both. When Burt gets home, he has some explaining to do.
1978
Mpls StPaul magazine cover
Leadership realizes if you include “the other Twin City” in the actual title, you can increase your readership and double your ad revenue. Mpls. is reborn as Mpls.St.Paul.
1989
Cohen, Anderson, and Johnson
Steve Adams, owner of Chicago magazine and son of WCCO radio legend Cedric Adams, buys Mpls.St.Paul from Burt Cohen. He elects to keep the triumvirate of Cohen, Anderson, and Johnson in place. Within five years, the three amigos buy it back.
1992
Top Docs debuts to help readers find the perfect white coats to pair with their aches and pains.
1994
TCBM magazine
Deb Hopp, former Twin Cities Reader editor and publisher, is recruited by Gary Johnson to start up Twin Cities Business Monthly. Eventually, Hopp pulls double duty as publisher of Mpls.St.Paul as well.
1994
Mac computer
Mpls.St.Paul partners with WCCO-TV to build Channel 4000, a television-centric news website. The mag figures it might as well experiment with this newfangled internet thing itself, launching mspmag.com. Google which one of these platforms is still with us.
1996
After Dwight and Vance Opperman sell legal giant West Publishing to Toronto-based Thomson Reuters for $3.4 billion, they buy Mpls.St.Paul from Cohen, Anderson, and Johnson. The Oppermans keep the triumvirate in place.
2000
Showcase home with Josh Hartnett
The mag links with the American Society of Interior Designers to renovate ASID’s fourth annual showcase home, a Victorian-style mansion on Lake of the Isles. Post–Pearl Harbor, Minneapolis South High alum Josh Hartnett buys it for $2.395 million the next year.
2010
Brian Anderson, the only editor in chief most of our readers—not to mention our writers and editors—have ever known, succumbs to cancer. Everyone at the magazine is devastated, but his onetime protégé, Jayne Haugen Olson, does what seems like the impossible and steps into Anderson’s shoes.
2012
Eyeball though a glass
After conveniently leaving her noncompete in a desk drawer unsigned, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl—who initially built her colorful-wig-wearing foodie-queen rep at City Pages—defects from our bitter rivals at Minnesota Monthly and begins writing for the good guys.
2013
Sportscaster Ralph Jon Fritz’s daughter Shelly Crowley returns as associate publisher of Mpls.St.Paul and is ultimately named publisher.
2017
Mpls StPaul Magazine cover
The Timeline, a new monthly front-of-book department filled with impossibly witty asides on key dates in Twin Cities history, debuts in our Super Bowl issue. Meta? Us? No way.
2020
Nora McInerny cancels her own monthly column in protest when the magazine makes cancelled radio show host Garrison Keillor its cover subject for the Hindsight 2020 issue—a themed issue about regret.
2021
Which's hat watertower
With a global pandemic warding staff away from our downtown Minneapolis offices for two years, Vance Opperman buys a building across the river near Prospect Park. After four decades of listening to a certain demo complain that we don’t cover St. Paul enough—well, if you can’t beat ’em…
