From his long-running Mpls.St.Paul magazine column to his table at the Minneapolis Club where he entertained a steady stream of business leaders, politicians, and community advocates, Burt Cohen possessed the gift of comedic timing—right up until the end, when he penned his own obituary, blaming his “lifelong habit of procrastination” for the lack of fact checking. Cohen, the founding publisher of Mpls.St. Paul and Twin Cities Business, died Saturday. He was 94—and a half.

He had a knack for finding humor in the mundane (“My barber says hair grows faster certain times of the year. I asked him how hair knows what month it is, but he didn’t know.”). But Cohen’s real legacy—beyond his 70-year publishing career and building two successful magazines in his beloved hometown—is one of mentorship and civic engagement. A trustee at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, he served on the president’s council for the Minnesota Opera, volunteered with the Children’s Theatre Company, and sat on the the alumni board of the University of Minnesota as well the University of St. Thomas.

“His greatest pride, besides having married our mom, was service to the community,” said Susan Cohen, one of Burt and Rusty Cohen’s three children. Rusty died of Alzheimer’s in 2023 at age 91. “The two of them together were such great advocates of the city—museums, the opera. They appreciated the arts and felt a gravitation to mission.”

Early career

Cohen graduated from the University of Minnesota where he studied journalism because, as he quipped in a 2019 interview on TCB’s podcast By All Means: “It did not involve any physical exercise, math, or really hard things I wasn’t good at.” He went into his father’s business, Modern Medicine Publications. And when it was sold to a division of the New York Times Media Company, he went to work there as part of the transaction. Following another acquisition, Cohen found himself “47 years old, essentially unemployed, with three kids who were hungry all the time.” He leaned into his love of the Twin Cities and in 1978, acquired a small magazine called MPLS, which he evolved into Mpls.St.Paul with the help the late editor Brian Anderson and a young sales exec named Gary Johnson, who would go on to become president of the magazine’s parent company, MSP Communications.

“I had a front row seat watching how he managed valued client relationships and ran our business with integrity and purpose,” said Johnson, who retired from MSP in 2021. “As the years passed, we became trusted partners, growing our small enterprise into one of the more successful regional magazine companies and award-winning digital content marketing groups in the country.”

“He was a culture maker,” Johnson added. “People wanted to work for him. They wanted to be successful for him. He inspired that kind of loyalty.”

That feeling persisted for generations of MSP employees. “Burt set an example from the top, honoring the division between the business side and editorial side,” said Jayne Haugen Olson, current editor in chief of Mpls.St.Paul. “He would often walk into my office to share story ideas but never had an expectation any of them would run.” His respect for editorial went farther. Olson recalls one instance when members of Burt’s personal network were upset about a particular story and Burt brought it to Olson’s attention. “I offered to apologize,” said Olson, “but Burt quickly pointed out that was not necessary, ‘it was never your intent to offend’ he said. Those words and the conversation that followed have always stuck with me.”

Having grown up in the world of publishing, with parents who entertained a lot and attended a steady stream of events, son Jeffrey Cohen said he marveled at the way his father treated everyone equally—“whether they were in a low position or a high position, he showed them the same amount of dignity and respect. It’s how he worked in his personal life, and his professional life.”

Handwritten notes were a Burt Cohen trademark. “He was a sentimental, heartfelt person,” Jeffery Cohen said. “He wanted the world to be a more civil place.”

The business magazine

By the late 1980s, Cohen, Johnson, and Anderson started discussing the need for a different sort of business magazine—one that, as Cohen described on By All Means, “looked at the pros and cons of everything going on, all the while acknowledging that business is the life blood of the community and the state.”

Twin Cities Business Monthly launched in September 1993 with Cohen as its founding publisher.

“We changed the local business marketplace by focusing on the challenges and opportunities business owners managed, their triumphs and their failures, their creative solutions, their big personalities and their business savvy,” Johnson said. “It was welcomed with open arms, and Burt thrived, wowing advertisers, business organizations, and the city’s movers and shakers as TCB’s entertaining and simpatico spokesperson. Needless to say, the competition went out of business, and TCB has gone on to a long and successful run.”

In early 1994, Cohen and Johnson convinced Deborah Hopp, who had worked for the Reader and Corporate Report, to join them. “Burt was very hands off, but he also had persistent and consistent ideas. He always had his finger on the pulse,” said Hopp, who recently retired as president of MSP Communication’s content agency, MSPC. “He understood the importance of being out in the community, that it mattered for the company to be at the table.”

And when the company, which in the 1990s was held by Northwest Ventures, needed new ownership, Cohen approached local businessman Vance Opperman. “My first contact with Burt was a phone call where he suggested we meet to discuss my ‘continued involvement in publishing’—his phrasing. Talk about a cold call,” Opperman said.

They met—where else?—at the Minneapolis Club. “He thoroughly entranced me with the possibilities of magazine publishing in the Twin Cities. He believed that communities had to have strong publications to tie them together. I still believe.” Opperman is the owner and CEO of MSP Communications.

No such thing as retirement

Long after he ceded his responsibilities at MSP Communications, Cohen came into the office every day, a practice that endured until the pandemic shutdown in 2020. Even then, he continued to write his monthly Mpls.St.Paul column, The Cohen Report, on his trusty typewriter. Despite his distaste for technology, Cohen became a minor phenomenon on Twitter, when a magazine editor suggested his random musings would play well on the social platform. True to his brand, Cohen typed his tweets and delivered them on fresh sheets of paper to the associate who posted them.

In April, at age 94, Cohen, who was suffering from aortic stenosis, decided the time had come to wrap up his long publishing career. He noted in his final column that “a lot of people have waited patiently to hear I will no longer be writing this column, and in my first actual scoop, I’m pleased to tell them their day has finally come.”

Those who knew him best fully expected Cohen to sign off on his own terms.

“Life with my dad was often hilarious,” Michael Cohen shared. “We still marvel at how he was able to come up with all of his make believe, but believable news items.”

Johnson recalled many a business lunch where Cohen regaled clients with references to the Marx Brothers, comedy writers of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and the Great American songbook. “He was the funniest person I’ve ever known—wry, clever, and absolutely hilarious,” Johnson said. “Burt instilled an ethos in me that stood the test of time: Do the right thing and you’ll never regret the life you lived. He was right about that, but then, he was right about almost everything.”