Q & A with our new deputy metro editor Phillip Piña

Phillip Piña joined the Star Tribune 13 months ago as the editor of our Twin Cities team. He was recently promoted to deputy metro editor, helping direct all of our metro area and Greater Minnesota news coverage.

Piña has worked at newsrooms on the East Coast and in Ohio, before moving to the Twin Cities in 2000 as a reporter for the Pioneer Press.

He grew up on a hog farm on the Ohio-Indiana border, the son of a minister, and went to Ohio State University, where he says he enrolled in a Journalism 101 class for an easy good grade. Instead, he was hooked. He lives in West St. Paul in a rambler that he is slowly fixing up.

Why journalism? When you grow up in a small rural town, often the local newspaper is a collection of baking recipes, scores from the local high school teams and stories on speakers at whatever community organization held a meeting that week. My uncle was a police officer in Chicago and every visit he would bring a stack of Chicago newspapers filled with mayhem; I would devour them. I went to college to study architecture but took Journalism 101 as a blow-off course with a friend my second quarter. I was hooked. Decades later and well into my career, the son of my uncle recalled watching me read the papers in the middle of chaotic family gatherings and said they always knew I would go into journalism. Perhaps growing up on a farm made me crave to know more about the world around us, and journalism is my way of doing just that.

Have you ever thought about leaving journalism? Yes. It is a bruising job. And the hits from shrinking newsrooms can make the task of informing the public at times overwhelming. But I was lucky to land at the Star Tribune, a place that is still committed to its readers, investing in its staff, and supplying the tools they need to tell the best stories possible. I am fortunate to be here.

News deserts continue to grow in the suburbs and Greater Minnesota. How do you balance that coverage with Twin Cities news? I stress that there are about as many residents in Dakota County as in the city of Minneapolis. We go where the stories are. And there are a lot of great stories in the suburbs and across Minnesota. That is why we have some of our most seasoned storytellers covering those areas.

Do you have a guiding mantra you like to emphasize with young reporters? Always err on the side of being aggressive. It is easier to pull back from a story than it is to catch up. It was a tip from a friend years ago upon my arrival in the Twin Cities.

Do you have a favorite story you've worked on in your career? After the Interstate 35W bridge collapse, I was the editor put in charge of coordinating coverage at the Pioneer Press. We pored through years of inspection reports. We decided the best way to present the information would be to show it graphically for the reader. Instead of a traditional long story, we had a short introduction summing up what we found. And then we took two entire pages inside for a drawing of the bridge and pointed out the inspections' findings in a massive informational graphic. Second favorite: A St. Paul school started a class on graphic novels. Instead of a traditional story, we wrote it entirely in graphic novel form, with the reporter and graphic artist collaborating. It was so much fun we put it on the front page.

The Star Tribune is largely a virtual news organization right now. How is that helping and hurting the organization? The necessity of going virtual has shown us how nimble we can be — and must be — to tell our stories. Evidence suggests some of the Star Tribune's best work has been done while virtual, winning one Pulitzer and a finalist for another. We don't want reporters chained to their desks. We want reporters out in the community, talking to Minnesotans and gathering their stories. But this is a large newsroom and we need a place to call home, a place where we can gather and think through ideas, collaborate over the details and plan together ways to do our best work.