Seeing the Good in Business
As far back as the late 1980s, Burt Cohen, founding publisher and owner of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, was talking about the need for a local business publication that wasn’t anti-business. He and Gary Johnson, then-president of MSP Communications, the company behind Mpls.St.Paul, took several years to nail down the format, the advertising, and the pitch.
“We went out and asked leaders of the business community and journalists what they thought about the concept,” Cohen recalled in a 2019 interview on the TCB podcast By All Means. “Almost to a person, they said, ‘it’s a really dumb idea and it will not succeed because we already have Corporate Report and two daily newspapers.’ So like idiots, we decided, we’re going to do it anyway.”
Twin Cities Business Monthly launched in September 1993 with Cohen as its founding publisher.
“By that point, the [competing] local business magazine was doing a monthly hit job on most of its subjects,” Johnson says. (Johnson retired from MSP in 2021.) “We thought we could re-energize the business community by introducing a Forbes-like magazine. The strategy was anchored in an advocacy of business—a position that Burt was absolutely made for. He was a man dedicated to his community, and the new magazine, Twin Cities Business Monthly, was a perfect fit for his primary mission as a publisher: Be fair, be nice, and make things better.”
Cohen lived by that credo until his final day in May, when he passed away at age 94. (Even in death, he got the last laugh, having written his own obituary in which he clarified that he did not die “of flabbiness, as had been widely predicted.”) In the many remembrances of his vibrant life and career, I’m struck by how his original premise for TCB holds true today. “We need a business publication that is really forthright and looks at the pros and cons of everything going on,” Cohen said on By All Means, “all the while acknowledging that business is the lifeblood of the community and the state.”
Johnson echoed Cohen’s reflections of the early days at TCB. “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. 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 here we are, 32 years later. Still dissecting the news, like we do in this issue with Adam Platt’s commercial real estate deep dive, which answers some of the perplexing questions about the current state of empty buildings and Liz Fedor’s look at how businesses are leading through economic uncertainty. And still celebrating the wins, like our 2025 Hall of Fame inductees, including—in a perfect twist of fate—Deb Hopp, whom Cohen and Johnson recruited in 1993 to be publisher of TCB.
I’d like to think Cohen would have delighted in this year’s Hall of Fame photo shoot, when we took five esteemed business leaders out of their offices to photograph them at Target Field. Our editorial team was initially nervous that all of the inductees other than former Twins president Dave St. Peter might find the locale a bit frivolous. But the best part of that picture-perfect day was how excited these leaders were to be in the ballpark hours before it opened to the public—to get a look at exclusive spaces like the press box and see the grounds crew prepare the field.
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That, too, is the legacy of Cohen: Have fun, even when you’re doing important things. Never take yourself too seriously. And remember, CEOs are people too.
“Everybody’s human,” Cohen would say, a mantra he repeated with every story idea he pitched me during lunches at the Minneapolis Club. (He brought handwritten lists.) “Whether it’s the head of a major company or someone taking coats at the door, they’re all working hard and contributing to the success of the business.”
With Burt in our heads and hearts, we’ll do our best to carry on that legacy.
