For 34 years, reporter Rachel Blount was a mainstay of the Minnesota Star Tribune’s sports coverage. That ended last Friday when she resigned in part due to the newspaper’s decision not to send a reporter to the Paris Olympics.
“I’m sad to announce I’m leaving the Star Tribune on Sept. 6,” she wrote in a Slack message to her colleagues . “Management’s decision not to send anyone to the Paris Olympics, and its lack of clarity about the ‘big, hard changes’ promised for the sports department, have led me to believe it’s best to step away now.”
Blount, who covered every Olympic Games since 1998 for the Star Tribune , said in July that she was disheartened to learn the paper would not be sending anyone to Paris for the 2024 Summer Games.
“ For the record: I am heartbroken [Star Tribune] decided not to send anyone to cover the Paris Olympics,” she wrote on X in July . “W e proudly covered our Minnesota athletes at the Games for more than 50 years. Senior management pulled the plug; I never got an explanation.”
Following her resignation, Blount spoke with Minnesota Public Radio’s Cathy Wurzer and shared more details on why this decision was so painful to her.
“This was not how I wanted my Star Tribune career to end,” Blount told Wurzer. “I had my biggest assignment taken away when senior management decided the Star Tribune was not sending anyone to the Paris Olympics. This is the first time in more than 50 years that the Strib didn’t have at least one reporter at an Olympic games.
“I won’t lie, it was absolutely crushing to me. That’s my signature assignment and not going to the Olympics was magnified by the fact that Suni Lee and Megan Smith, two of the greatest women’s athletes Minnesota has ever produced, went to Paris and won eight medals and their hometown paper was not there to cover them. Two athletes we’ve covered since they were teenagers. Two homegrown Minnesotans. And that was very upsetting to me, that we missed out on this opportunity to give two great women athletes their due.”
Wurzer asked if she felt like the Star Tribune’s decision was related to a larger shift in how it planned to cover sports moving forward.
“We have been told that there will be some major changes still coming for the sports department. We have no specifics on those. And I frankly don’t know what that means for my role and that’s why all these things together made me feel maybe this was just a time when I should step away,” Blount said.
Blount’s storied career, which began as an intern at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saw her tackle major stories that ran the gamut from college football to the Minnesota North Stars to horse racing to, of course, the Olympics. All the while, she had to deal with the perils of being a female sports reporter in places dominated by men, some of whom made locker rooms very inhospitable places for reporters like her .
“Representation is important. There have to be women in sports journalism. There have to be people of color in sports journalism,” Blount said. You can’t just allow all white men to cover these things. Sports is for everyone. Everyone participates in sports. Everyone enjoys sports.
“It was so important at the time that I started when they’re weren’t many women in the business to show people that women knew about sports, they cared about sports, they could go in and write about sports as knowledgably as any man.”
No word on what’s next for Blount but it feels like she’s got many more stories to tell, sports-related or otherwise.
As for the Minnesota Star Tribune (an updated name from the previous Star Tribune), it recently announced a reorganization of its newsroom and expansion of its statewide coverage. It’s unclear specifically how that reorganization impacted the sports department and Blount’s role.
[ MPR , Sports Take ]
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