I’m an author, speechwriter, editor, writer, and executive communications advisor.
From July 2018 to July 2020, I was the Manager, Communications, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Previous to that, I was for seven years the speechwriter for then University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler.
Most of my career was spent as a reporter and writer based in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. I specialized in sports business, off-the-field sports issues, and Minnesota politics. I covered every Winter and Summer Olympics between 1984 and 2010.
In 2019, my book, Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian, was published, It’s the posthumous memoir of the late, entertaining, and beloved University of Minnesota scholar Hy Berman.
In 2008-09, I covered the Al Franken-Norm Coleman U.S. Senate recount for MinnPost. For that reporting, I was honored with the Frank Premack Award, Minnesota’s most prestigious journalism recognition.
My subsequent book about the recount — THIS IS NOT FLORIDA: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount — was published in October 2010. It was nominated for a 2011 Minnesota Book Award.
In 2004-05, I was a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and from 2005-2007 was an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Minnesota.
In 2000, I authored the book, Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles. That was the major project of my nearly two decades as the sports business reporter for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, covering repeated arena and stadium finance debates.
I attended Oberlin College where I studied under noted and controversial sports sociologist Jack Scott. I graduated from Temple University in 1975.
My spouse is Ann Juergens, a professor emerita at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul.
We have two sons. Henry is a senior assistant general counsel at Exact Sciences in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s married to Allison (Hill) Weiner, a speech, language, and communications disorder pathologist in the Milwaukee Public Schools. (Henry and Alli have two sons: Auggie, born in 2018, and Abe, born in 2020.) Son Nate is a hospital medicine attending physician and internal medicine faculty member at Alameda Health System’s Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif. His spouse is Glafira (Glasha) Marcon, the Managing Consultant at Justly Health, a health equity, social determinants of health, and climate justice consulting firm.