Toni Randolph, an award-winning journalist at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) who championed diverse voices in news stories and newsrooms and mentored the next generation of young reporters, died Sunday. She was 53.
Randolph joined MPR as a reporter in 2003 and covered everything from the St. Paul Winter Carnival to homelessness and immigration issues. She was named news editor for new audiences in June 2010; at that time, it was a new position aimed at connecting with ethnically diverse Minnesotans.
In a memo to colleagues Sunday, MPR's executive director for news and programming, Nancy Cassutt, said Randolph died "while undergoing surgery for cancer treatment."
The memo continued, "Because Toni was such a private person, many of us did not even know she was sick but she had been fighting cancer for more than three years. [Her brother] Morgan told me … that she came to work in pain and many of us just didn't know."
Randolph, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., was a news director at her local public radio station and covered state politics at a Boston station before joining MPR. She earned a master's degree at the Columbia School of Journalism and went on fellowships to China and Liberia.
She was a prolific reporter, with 22 stories listed on MPR's web page in 2010 alone. In 2013, she wrote a personal essay about Macy's closing its store in downtown St. Paul. Earlier this year, she wrote an obituary on a Somali youth activist.
She was passionate about training high school and college journalists, particularly those of color. She worked as a mentor for the University of St. Thomas' ThreeSixty Journalism program and was a journalism camp full mentor for the first time in 2013.
A student journalist interviewed Randolph that year, asking what made her want to work with teens.
