In college, Steve Lange aspired to become a sailboat designer, but his passion for writing and editing steered him onto a different course. For nearly 25 years, he has served as editor of Rochester Magazine, a monthly lifestyle publication known for its award-winning storytelling in Rochester, Minnesota. The magazine has longevity and is celebrating 25 years in print. Steve proudly guides a dedicated team, crafting compelling narratives that resonate with their audience.
Rochester Magazine
Experience Rochester, MN
In college, Steve Lange aspired to become a sailboat designer, but his passion for writing and editing steered him onto a different course. For nearly 25 years, he has served as editor of Rochester Magazine, a monthly lifestyle publication known for its award-winning storytelling in Rochester, Minnesota. The magazine has longevity and is celebrating 25 years in print. Steve proudly guides a dedicated team, crafting compelling narratives that resonate with their audience.
Rochester Magazine
Experience Rochester, MN
The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.
Steve Lange:We've never really tried to write for what we think the people want to read. We're probably not very good at trying to come up with that. We try to write about things that we are sincere about and believe in and get excited about, and we think that comes across on the page.
Bill Von Bank:Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics, from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Vaughn Bank. In college, steve Lang aspired to become a sailboat designer, but his passion for writing and editing steered him on to a different course. For nearly 25 years, he has served as editor of Rochester Magazine, a monthly lifestyle publication known for its award-winning storytelling In Rochester, minnesota. The magazine has longevity and is celebrating 25 years in print. Steve proudly guides a dedicated team crafting compelling narratives that resonate with their audience. Steve Lang, welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast.
Steve Lange:Hey, thanks, bill. You guys do a great job and I'm just happy to be here.
Bill Von Bank:Steve, can you tell us about your journey as a writer and editor?
Steve Lange:You know it's been a long one, and, boy, I've been doing this now for 30-some years, which seems impossible to me. But I've always liked writing, always was drawn to it, but went to school to be a sailboat designer, really got heavy into the math and engineering side of the thing. It's really something that my family has had a history of. My dad's a great engineer, my brother is, and then I was in a Calc III class in college and couldn't stand it anymore and I had a professor who'd asked me to help him edit a book. He was writing a fiction book and I thought, geez, I can make a living doing this. And that was really the turning point for me and I moved on from Calc III into some pretty basic English courses and ended up with a degree in written communications.
Bill Von Bank:One side of the brain to the other.
Steve Lange:You know, I realized I'm probably much more suited to the writing side of the brain than the engineering side.
Bill Von Bank:How has your role evolved over the years?
Steve Lange:When I first started off, honestly, all I wanted to do was write. I was trying to make a living as a writer. I was living in a $110 a month apartment in, you know, Northern Michigan and making 10 cents a word writing fiction or poetry or whatever anyone would buy for me. So that was what I did for years. And you know, when you're forced to eat processed cheese, food, cheese sandwiches every day and, you know, share an apartment with a, with a couple other guys that you barely know, and you're trying to make a living doing this, it was really. It was really helpful for me in order to force me to kind of, hopefully, help perfect my craft.
Bill Von Bank:You've been a fixture in the media landscape in Rochester, minnesota, for decades and our editor of the Rochester magazine been involved with the publication almost since day one, and it's celebrating 25 years. First of all, congratulations on that feat.
Steve Lange:Thank you, it's an awesome feat. I've never been called a fixture of anything. I think that's probably representative of my age more than my longevity here. But yeah, it has been a feat and it's been a phenomenal team we've had over the years just unbelievable people come and go who really put their heart and soul into Rochester magazine. And yeah, I came out in April of 2000 from Michigan and thought we'd be here for a two or three year stint and 24 years and two more kids later were still here.
Bill Von Bank:Tell us about the magazine. It's impressive. I read every issue every month.
Steve Lange:And I know you're not just saying that because you've actually talked to me about stories, so I know that you really do and I absolutely appreciate that. You know it started off. We were like I said. I came out, the magazine was a couple issues old and I was the only full timer working for it. It was very much more like a city pages magazine, then all newsprint with a glossy cover, and then it just evolved. We get more and more advertising, more and more people who wanted to hold on to the magazine longer, and we shifted to glossy paper and boy 2007. Few years later we had a full time staff of designers, sales people and myself. Right now it's really just me. We have a part time associate editor, Tessa Olive, who's a phenomenal ad director, and then we have one woman who does almost all of the design. So it's still a pretty small team, but really a group that puts their heart and soul into it.
Bill Von Bank:Very lifestyle focused.
Steve Lange:We have really found, I think, our niche in Rochester. We love telling the stories of people. We love telling people what kind of opportunities they have in Rochester, including a lot of restaurant and food opportunities which you know about as well as anyone. We really want to be that magazine that anyone in town, visitor or local, can pick up and say, oh, I want to do this or read about this person or learn about this history of Rochester.
Bill Von Bank:I'm a consumer of a lot of media and I have to tell you there's not a lot of monthly publications that are free and yours is.
Steve Lange:You know, that has really been something that we've held on to. We've had a lot of other publications who've come and gone and weren't able to sustain this model. We have 200 locations around town. We're printing, you know, upwards of 15,000 copies every month and we have a hard time keeping those in stock. We have really realized that with this kind of community, especially with the transient people at Mayo Clinic, this was the only way we were going to survive and thrive and it's really worked out for us. We've had plenty of those discussions to go to a paid model and we've not done that and I'm really glad we haven't.
Bill Von Bank:I'm staring at the most recent issue, which is a coveted one in Rochester because it focuses on Rochester's favorite restaurants. It's a reader fan-voted publication for this month. Tell us about how Rochester's favorite restaurants issue got started. It's as old as the publication.
Steve Lange:You know what is, and it's one of the things I brought here right away. Right, I'd done this at. I was at Lansing City Limits Magazine in Michigan. I'd been in a few other comparable publications and when I came here I knew this was something I wanted to do until we were halfway through of year one. So this is 2000,. Right, we're halfway through year one and I'm telling the votes and Applebee's is winning in the best restaurant category and I thought what have I done and where am I living? Luckily, I think Henry Wellington ended up winning with Michaels in a close second that year.
Steve Lange:But we've really done this. It's not supposed to be a popular area contest, it is. The real idea of this is to just get the word out there about restaurants, to promote and support local restaurants, and that's really worked. And you talk about this month's cover, shelby Schwab, who is a barista, our best barista, voted by our readers at Cafe Steam. I was in there for a meeting and she's signing copies of the magazine, right? So how awesome is that that people are recognizing other people in the restaurant community in town and other restaurants who recognize other restaurants in town. The amount of people who share someone else winning is really heartening, and that's what we wanted to do here. Right, we just want to support the local community.
Bill Von Bank:And they really lean in on it.
Steve Lange:It is unbelievable. So, and I will say, since day one I have done everything I can to completely oversee the balloting. So our house was a sweatshop in the early days with my kids tallying all the paper ballots. We get maybe 2,000 plus paper ballots back in the day. If everyone votes 20 times, that's 40,000 votes. Right, that's a city election. So from the start we had outside groups who would oversee some of the voting, but I always took it upon myself because that way people accused us of jimmying the ballot. They were going to accuse me personally of that and if you look at it, not all of our advertisers win. Not everyone that wins is an advertiser. It's been pretty amazing to see how far people do lean in.
Bill Von Bank:Yeah, the longevity speaks for itself.
Steve Lange:You know and it's always one of those that gets a little dicey right, but the way it has turned in the past handfully years, especially it's people who want to see other people succeed, it is people who love recognizing other people in the community, and that's why we do it.
Bill Von Bank:With your extensive experience in storytelling, what do you believe makes for a compelling story?
Steve Lange:Well, you know, bill, as well as anyone, when you do these types of things, Everyone can tell a good story, right? Everybody tells a good story. If you record yourself telling that one cool story, you have and go back and listen to it. We all do it. I just get a chance to do it for a living. But you know, it's all of the very specific anecdotes. It's all of the kind of conversational approach to the question and answer phase to get get the information out of people and make them feel comfortable.
Steve Lange:We do a piece, the magazine called random Rochester. Jennifer Koski, our associate editor, does a phenomenal job of that every month and almost to a person every month. When she asks people to be part of this, they always say I don't have anything interesting, what do I have to give you? And she'll spend an hour with them and she comes back with the most amazing stories. Right, it's some World War two vet who dragged his buddy off the front lines. It's some woman who came here from Thailand and worked five jobs in order to support herself. Everyone's got a great story. So if you just take the time and listen, you're gonna find them.
Bill Von Bank:Rochester magazine has received numerous awards over the years. What do you attribute to its success and how do you ensure the publication remains relevant and engaging to its audience?
Steve Lange:We have a saying around the office we have won a lot of awards, but we always say we don't put any stock in the awards, we don't care about them unless we win. And then they're the embodiment of everything that's good and holy right.
Steve Lange:We don't win. It's like I, this is super subjective, so we really try not to pay too much attention. The awards I've judged a lot of these awards organization categories and and there's a lot of great stuff out there. We have been really lucky to win a lot of awards from Minnesota and the Midwest and beyond. Honestly, I attribute that to what makes the magazine successful. We just try to be sincere in what we do. Right, I can buy into anyone if I believe they're sincere in their beliefs. So we've never tried it sounds a little bit arrogant when I'm gonna say it, but it we've never really tried to write For what we think the people want to read. We're probably not very good at trying to come up with that. We try to write about things that we are sincere about and believe in and get excited about, and we think that comes across on the page.
Bill Von Bank:Can you share a memorable experience or story from your career that resonates with you?
Steve Lange:And I've had a lot of them. That's a great question. I will tell you one early one that kind of set the tone for what we do as far as you know, hopefully Fact checking goes, etc. I had written a story, I was a newbie at a newspaper in northern Michigan. I'd written a story and I interviewed the person over the phone. They had an address and drudges name, like Pat right. I interviewed the person over the phone and this sounds horrible. I thought it was a woman.
Steve Lange:I wrote the story as if I was writing about a woman. Luckily, one of the angles was gonna be this person was gonna be the first woman to whatever the position was, you know oversee the state parks in Michigan, whatever it was. And I didn't, luckily. And I wrote the story and I got a call from this person saying oh, you love the story. We got a couple typos and it was where I'd said she instead of he and it was one of those moments that really resonated with me. As far as the grovy toss goes of what we do here, I would have done that wrong and I very well could have been egregiously wrong. What kind of impact would that have had? And I was pretty young at that point and it really struck me as man. I have better get on the ball as far as fact checking goes, and it's the thing that lets me sleep at night. If somebody tells you their name is John Smith, you better ask, because you know it'll be J-O-N-S-M-Y-T-H.
Bill Von Bank:You wear two hats. You are both editor of Rochester Magazine and you're the general manager of the Post Bulletin, which is Rochester's daily newspaper. How do you balance responsibilities of overseeing editorial content while also managing the business aspects of the newspaper? That seems like a heavy load.
Steve Lange:Yeah, I'm not sure if I do. So. Yeah, you're right. I've been the editor of Rochester Magazine since 2000. In February of last year I was named interim general manager of the Post Bulletin and then in June or July of 2023, I was I was named the general manager of the Post Bulletin. I will tell you, the team at the PB doesn't need me to get terribly involved. Jeff Peters, on the edit side, is very much the ultimate newspaper editor who oversees his team. Phenomenal staff there. Tessa Olive on the sales side is the ad director for the magazine and the newspaper. She also doesn't need me interfering. Patty Leonard, the business manager, and I'll tell you. When they offered me the job I said you got to call those three. If they're on board, I'll be on board, if not, I can't survive. So really I do nothing, but stay out of the way of a really good team on the GM side.
Bill Von Bank:With the rise of digital media and social platforms, how do you see traditional local newspapers evolving to adapt to changing audience behaviors and consumption habits?
Steve Lange:I'm going to preface this with a brag, but since August of 2023, we've gained a net of just under 2000 subscribers for the Post Bulletin. That's a huge gain for us in six months. In that same time frame, our digital subscriptions our online product bypassed, for the first time in the history of the Post Bulletin, our print products. So our number of online subscribers has now passed and continued to gain on and pass our print subscribers. So that's something we never would have thought was possible 10 years ago and we have probably more people reading the Post Bulletin than ever in the history of it because of the online presence, and most newspapers can probably say that about themselves.
Steve Lange:That was hard for me to get my head around. I love the tangible product. I love Rochester Magazine because they can hold it in my hand. I really miss the daily printing of the Post Bulletin. I used to go down and sit in the press room and watch it print, but we realized I read the New York Times. I don't get the subscription, I read it on my phone. It's really well done and I've come to love it that way, and I think a lot of people are seeing that same thing with all newspapers.
Bill Von Bank:There's been some reporting, including in the Post Bulletin, about the changing dynamics or really the loss of local newspapers in small communities and that seems like a challenge. Are there ways to try and overcome that? I know with the Post Bulletin you have a regional audience, not just Rochester.
Steve Lange:Again, another blatant plug for Forum Communications, who is our owner. They bought us in July of 2019. Phenomenal group. They own 2,000 newspapers and TV stations across the upper Midwest. St Cloud lost its print newspaper and we saw that as a devastating desert of local news. How can St Cloud not have a paper? Our boss, the owner of Forum Communications, bill Marcel Jr, came to the group and said, look, we got to have a paper here. I don't care what it's going to cost us, we need to have that. So that is kind of the mindset of the Post Bulletin. Because of Forum Communications, we are adding staffers on the edit side when no one else is doing that. We really have believed in content for a long time, even though others were cutting back on content, and we just see that as as the utmost importance in a local community to be able to get you know vetted, responsible community news.
Bill Von Bank:The media landscape is constantly evolving. How do you stay ahead of trends and anticipate the needs and interests of your audience when developing content?
Steve Lange:I think it's Steve Jobs who had a quote. He said you can't ask people what they want and then try to give it to them. By the time you do, they want something else. So one of the things we try to do with the magazine specifically is just do those stories that, again, are sincere, we think are important and we hope that the readership follows. The post-bulletin was lucky, in a sad sense, when COVID hit, because we had already kind of prepared for this digital landscape well before other people did so. When COVID hit we were already six months into a two or three year program of changing to a digital focus. I don't think other people were. So COVID really just catalyzed our plan and moved it forward by maybe a year or two. And that's where we really realized we can make a difference. We can have the big, in-depth stories with the great presentation online and we can have the breaking news that people can click on their phone right away and see what's happening with an accident on, you know, on Broadway.
Bill Von Bank:You are an adventure seeker. I know that, from racing cars to surviving solo in the wilderness. How do these adventures influence your approach to storytelling and do they inform the stories you choose to pursue?
Steve Lange:When you ask earlier about what makes a great story, it's time with the subject, whatever that subject is. So for me, I absolutely love even though I may not at the time completely immersing myself in a story. So I took boxing lessons at the old 4th Street Youth Boxing Gym in order to fight a former pro, dan O'Connor. He's not going to listen to this so I'll tell you I kicked his butt. But so you know, that kind of thing for me to train for six weeks and then get to actually get in the ring with a crowd there and fight a guy who had fought as a pro. He was obviously much older than me, but he still really put a beating on me. You know. That completely changed how I understood the story and I luckily have the latitude to do that.
Steve Lange:With a magazine. I can spend four days following someone around to really do an in-depth interview with them and pick and choose what I want. That's the difference between what I get to do with the magazine and what sometimes they have to do in the newspaper business. I can spend three days at survival school in the North Woods, where I probably would have died if when the PB photographer hadn't. When he came up. He slipped a twinkie in my pocket. I probably wouldn't have survived that North Woods experience. But to get to do those things and write about them in that sort of way is what makes my job so awesome. I can really experience something and write about it from that experience.
Bill Von Bank:You have a column. It's called Oddchester and it's award-winning column. In fact, tell us about that.
Steve Lange:So that's something. I actually probably started a form of it back in the 1990s. I was actually self. When I was doing that freelance writing and trying to make a living that way. I had been picked up by about two dozen newspapers around the Midwest who had picked up my column, so I had a weekly column. I had to write every week and literally some of the papers would pay me $3 a week and some would pay me $20. But I had enough papers where I was almost making a living writing this weekly column right in my $110 a month apartment. So it was so One room it was not only one room, I had to share a bathroom with some people down the hall but it included linens. The woman would come in and make my bed and clean it. So that was awesome.
Steve Lange:But that was how Oddchester started. And then, when I came to the post-bulletin, I brought that name and that concept here and they were a little leery of that type of column at the time, but it started off in the magazine monthly. And then, in 2013, Greg Selnau, a good friend of mine and a great columnist in Rochester, passed away A horrible time for all of us and they asked me to take Greg's spot in the paper. Certainly, I wasn't going to fill Greg's shoes, but I started at Oddchester in 2013 from the newspaper, after writing it for 13 years before that on a monthly basis for the magazine and boy. I think I've done it almost every week since 2013. I think I'm every other week for the most part now, but that's a great read.
Bill Von Bank:What advice would you give to aspiring journalists, especially those interested in pursuing a career in local journalism?
Steve Lange:There's a lot of aspects to that, but one, right, like you talk, like I said, everyone tells a good story. Don't try to do something that's beyond what you're really able to do. Use the words and cadence and anecdotes that you would normally use. And two, it's a lot of work, right.
Steve Lange:We get people come to us wanting to write for the magazine or work for the magazine. The people we look for, we look for, aren't necessarily the people who've gone to the best journalism schools and got that you know degree. We're looking for the people who have written for everyone they could write for, for everyone who was paying ten cents a word that they were willing to do a story for. And for me it was a ton of marketing, right? So I'm working Writing stories and I was sending out five manuscripts every day, maybe the same manuscript, but to all these different magazines, hoping someone would, you know, take one of my stories and pay me for it. And and it's a lot of work you can be a pretty mediocre writer and a hard worker and you can really do well in this business.
Bill Von Bank:Steve Lang. You tell great stories. It's been great to have you on the growing destinations podcast. Continued success with Rochester magazine and all the great work you do in Rochester.
Steve Lange:Thanks, bill, and I really appreciate what you guys do here. This is just another form of storytelling and I encourage people to go back and and look at the back Issues of this podcast, because there's a lot of great stuff, a lot of great promotion of Rochester and you guys do a phenomenal job here.
Bill Von Bank:Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the growing destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester, minnesota, and its growing arts and culture scene, its international culinary flavors and award-winning craft beer by visiting experiencerochestermncom.