Tim McNiff and Media Minefield

Photos: Tate Carlson

Almost 10 years after we first featured former broadcast journalist and longtime Plymouth resident Tim McNiff, we reconnect as he embarks on what he considers the third iteration of his media career.

“Sure, you hope you’ve entertained people and maybe informed people—but to be able to make a greater impact in a positive way, to help people succeed, that’s just an incredible feeling.” —Tim McNiff, on the transition from broadcast personality to Media Minefield

How well do you know Tim McNiff? Like so many people under the media spotlight, who arrive like clockwork in your homes every weekday morning for more than 10 years, there’s a certain familiarity that’s assumed. But did you know he’s so passionate about sports that he’s been a volunteer coach at Wayzata High School for eight years; that he’s so sensitive that tears still come to his eyes at the mention of Tom Burnett Jr. (the Bloomington native who helped bring down the 9/11 plane in the Pennsylvania field before it could hit the Pentagon); or that he’s still such an avid sports fan that even with his 5-foot 10-inch frame, he’s parlayed his high school football and basketball prowess into successful 5Ks and cycling efforts?

 In fact, you might know all of these things from his time spent on KARE 11 Sunrise seated next to Kim Insley, because, by all accounts, he’s that same “real” family guy on the air as he is off, one so committed to the benefits of routine that he’s lived in the same house in Plymouth for 15 years. But this fall, McNiff—a father of two daughters, one a sophomore studying theater at NYU and the other a senior at Wayzata—is finally taking his schedule into his own hands, giving up the late nights and weekends of his early career, and the early mornings (and nights) of his most recent gig for a “9 to 5” at Media Minefield. And it’s the aforementioned passion that makes him a perfect fit for this relatively novel media relations company, which was launched in 2010 by another Plymouth resident, Kristi Piehl, with the mission of helping local businesses and people.

But let’s take a brief step back: White Bear Lake native McNiff met his wife Amy O’Rourke in 1981 while at college at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where they both were studying mass communications. He first caught her eye after a game of pick-up football (he’d recognized her from high school hockey games, as he was a White Bear Mariner Dolphin and she was a cheerleader for rival Hill-Murray). The rest, as they say, is history.

Take 1: Sporting Life

As many college kids do, McNiff pursued an internship and landed a prime one at KARE 11 in 1986. “It was my experience as an intern in college that got me my first job,” McNiff now admits. After a 3.5-year stint in La Crosse, Wis., he was working as a sports reporter in Waco when he got the call.

“We used to have these pink slips, ‘While you were out,’ and when I came back from assignment one day I had about 15 of these posted around my cube, because everyone I knew from KARE was calling” about what eventually became his job as sports producer—and eventually sports reporter and weekend sports anchor—in 1993.“When working in sports, I’d have Mondays and Tuesdays off, which was great because when the girls were little, that was just our weekend—Amy was home with them at the time—so it worked out well,” McNiff says. He recalls highlights from those days of the Olympics in both Sydney and Salt Lake City. For the latter, he was able to bring his entire family along for a month in the Utah mountains.

“But once the girls started school, I was missing things and often not seeing them at all because I’d be up late, possibly still sleeping when they got up and already off to work when they got home from school,” he says. “So when they were in the first and third grades, and the opportunity for the morning show came up, I decided to throw my name in the hat.”When the McNiffs first moved back to Minnesota, they got an apartment in Eagan, then a first home in New Hope. But when daughters Bridget and Haley were approaching school age, Amy intentionally decided she wanted to be in the Wayzata School District. “The people of Plymouth we’ve met have been just wonderful,” Tim McNiff says. “We have a great friend group. My younger daughter, for example, has the same group of friends she’s always had, from soccer.”

Take 2: A Family Pursuit

Kim Insley remembers that first trial day on Wake Up with KARE: McNiff’s alarm was mis-set, and he raced into the studio 2 minutes late for the first segment. “She was very gracious about it,” McNiff says. “I just had to laugh,” Insley admits: “It’s the worst feeling in the world, and it never happened again. [Toward the end of his tenure] he beat me in every day.”

After a few months of “trying on the morning anchor gig,” McNiff wasn’t entirely sure which direction his career would go—that is until his daughters overheard him talking about it with a neighbor. “I walked into the next room, and they were just crying and said, ‘Please don’t go back to sports, Daddy.’ That made the decision easy,” he says, acknowledging that the schedule of a broadcast journalist really did take its toll in more ways than even he had realized. “Tim is first and foremost a family guy,” says Insley, who also lives in Plymouth. “He puts his family before anything. When he first got the morning gig, he was so pleased (as were his girls) that he would no longer be working weekends, and he would be around at night for them. That was a huge incentive for him to take on a shift that a lot of people turn down.”But he was trading late and absent nights for early, absent mornings. “Most days I’d be waking up at 2 a.m.; I was most dangerous from 11 a.m. on,” he says, noting he never allowed himself more than a 20 minute nap for fear he wouldn’t be able to sleep early enough at night. “You’re always playing this game of sleep, and I admire anyone and everyone who has that sort of schedule.” Often he still managed six hours of sleep each night, going to bed between 7 and 8 p.m., but this also took a toll on his social life.Insley and McNiff became mainstays on the Twin Cities morning scene, co-anchoring for the next 10 years. “Kim and I were very good at working together in a crisis,” McNiff says. “We were very conscious of how we did the tough stories.”

But Insley inserts her own support of the challenges of the schedule: “One year we got sent to Washington D.C., where they had created a set to mimic NBC’s Today Show,” she says. “Meredith Vieira was going to be the new host, and they wanted to shoot promos with all the morning show people around the country. It was a quick trip out and back, but the timing was not the best: I found out I was the one having dinner with Tim on the night of his wedding anniversary, not his wife, Amy. She put up with a lot.”

Take 3: Opportunity Knocks

At a team building event his first week at Media Minefield, in which the entire 11-person staff (now up to 12) was broken into small teams then locked in separate rooms of a building in downtown Minneapolis with just a couple of clues as to how to get out, McNiff got his first real look into the creative environment that was part of what drew him away from the newsroom. (For the record, the activity helped the team grow together, but McNiff’s group had a “near miss” getting out of their locked room before the time limit was up.)

For McNiff, the decision to transition careers yet again wasn’t so much a case of leaving something as it was starting something new. “I started having meetings with my new boss, Kristi Piehl, a year ago” this month, McNiff says; while the two live just a mile apart, it was a mutual friend who connected them originally. “I told her about my interests, she shared what she was trying to do, and it just sounded so right and so cool—the team things and fun things she was working on. I left that first meeting thinking, ‘That’s a really cool place to be.’

From November through May, Piehl and McNiff kept in contact: “We wanted to be respectful of Tim’s current job,” Piehl says. “KARE was really great about it,” McNiff adds. “When I could start discussing my contract around May, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to stay, but at this stage in life, if someone gives you an opportunity like this, you have to be respectful of it. It recharges you.”This career shift might have been hard for his wife to wrap her head around at first, McNiff speculates: “She didn’t have the advantage of meeting with Kristi that I had,” he says.  But Amy McNiff is entirely supportive. “I’m very, very excited for him … for how excited he was after those meetings,” she says. “Working with people, helping them solve problems, he’s always had a knack for that.”

McNiff’s job as executive director of media relations is to sell the story of Media Minefield, which boasts more than 100 years of combined real-newsroom experience and a 100 percent success or media-placement rate for its clients. These range from National Investors to a plethora of local businesses who might not have been aware such a company exists right here in Minnesota. “Essentially, I’ll be telling the story of what we do and how we do it,” McNiff says. “We show businesses how to use and maximize the media options available. It’s exciting in that I know this stuff.”

Wife Amy concurs: “When I used to sell advertising in La Crosse and Waco, I was really good at the people-person stuff; I could sell anything,” she says. “But when it came to thinking on my feet and coming up with creative solutions, Tim would always have a great idea that would help me immensely.”

The media communications firm can best be defined as media relations, founder Piehl says. “The reporter and the managing editors telling the stories on the news stations had to learn about them somewhere,” she explains. “We’re kind of the matchmaker—newsrooms are looking for those kinds of connectors.” Ultimately, McNiff is tasked with growing the company, especially in the company’s new realms of crisis communication and media training.“I’m so grateful to find something that’s again in my own backyard,” he says (Media Minefield is based in Minnetonka). “It will be a great learning opportunity for me. It’s wonderful at this point in my career—sure, you hope you’ve entertained people and maybe informed people—but to be able to make a greater impact in a positive way, to help people succeed, that’s just an incredible feeling.”

His favorite part so far?  “All of it,” he says. “The schedule, it’s as close to a 9 to 5 as I’ve ever had. And I’m still getting out into the community in a different way. I get to interview people to discover what their issues are, how I can—how we can—help. I’ve joined a team that’s been hand-picked, each stars in their respective newsrooms. I’m very excited to be a part of it.” As the holidays approach, he also acknowledges it’s really nice to not have to worry about working on Christmas or the Fourth of July—and especially not on Black Friday. “That was always the worst,” he says, “because by the time we’re on the air, no one is in front of the TV anymore.” But there are things he misses, too, most notably the people. “Sven [Sundgaard], in particular, is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and he was constantly trying to make me laugh. I miss that every day,” McNiff admits. “Then there’s the whole ego thing. Long-term, it’s part of what I’m kind of nervous about: Will I miss the recognizability? Will I crave it? How will that ego thing play into this? I don’t know what it will be like to lose that ‘Hey, you’re Tim McNiff!’ I think all TV personalities have that ego to some extent, so we’ll see how much of it I’ve got as time goes on.”

And, Roll the Tape
When it comes to helping people, McNiff derives much of his inspiration from someone who’s no longer here. “My dad (deceased) sold for 3M for 30 years, people from Kenya to Australia, all around the world. When we were in Sydney for the Olympics, we were invited on a 3M boat cruise, and it took me a while for it to occur to me that we were the purpose for the cruise (not just guests on a preplanned cruise), all because of my dad,” McNiff says. “They said to me, ‘Your dad was such a big help in building 3M Sydney, in getting the company up and running and all of us our jobs. He was a true ambassador.’ How do you top that? So now I feel like it’s full circle, helping small businesses or associations find a voice. I hope I got enough of him to be able to do that well.”

The new job isn’t the first time McNiff has given back, of course. Take, for example, his side gig as running backs’ coach at Wayzata High School’s football team under coach Brad Anderson. “It’s an obsession with him,” Insley says, “and every Monday morning we got a full scouting report on the game that was played and the week ahead.” “I love sports; I’m very passionate about them,” he says. “I’ve gotten to watch boys become young men, see some of them graduate from West Point and Stanford, another play for the NFL.” Insley also comments on the McNiffs’ commitment to volunteering, Tim particularly with Plymouth-based Bolder Options (a mentoring program founded by former NFL player Darrell Thompson), and “Amy’s a fantastic volunteer,” she says. “Both of them have made a big impact in the community.”

With so much change, it’s hard to imagine more evolution for the McNiffs, but in many ways the liberties afforded a daytime job offer new adventures in abundance for the couple, married 28 years this past July. Whether it’s spending a few more nights out at Ketsana’s—“her egg rolls are to die for,” McNiff says—or working out more at Life Time Fitness, they’re excited about their empty nest years. “We always said that in our 50s we’d do pairs body building,” each tells me separately. When shown this simpatico, they laugh—but with the history between this active pair, one doesn’t doubt the possibilities.

Tim McNiff’s 5 Most Memorable Stories

We asked the former sports reporter and morning show host to narrow down his career into these top intriguingly different anecdotes.

5. When I was an intern, the first time I was sent to the Metrodome, I was walking down a tunnel and there was Gary Guyette, smoking a cigarette. Later, I’m hanging out in the clubhouse with Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek, and all I can think is, “I’m in the Twins locker room.” I don’t think I asked a question for the first two weeks on that beat.

4. To try out anchoring for Sunrise, I had my alarm set incorrectly, and I got a call at 4:30 asking if I’m coming in. I sprang up and said I was on my way and arrived with a couple of minutes to spare, and my heart just sank, because as I approached, the red “On Air” sign was bright. I waited and when we went off air I went in and apologized to Kim and said, “I thought I made it by 5,” and she said, “We start at 4:57,” so I was late my very first day.

3. Doing the Academic All-star segment—a high school prep showcase he regularly wrote as weekend sports anchor: That really gave me faith in the future, talking to these kids.

2. From an emotional standpoint, 9/11, that is probably number 1. Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania, and Tom Burnett Jr. was on that plane. I had a different assignment that night, but I knew that Bloomington Jefferson was doing something to honor him, and I went around the newsroom until I could get someone to back me up on changing my assignment. I was the first reporter to speak to his parents, and they weren’t going to go to the memorial, but then when I was there someone touched me on the back, and there was Tom Burnett Sr. We hugged and just cried on the spot. I led the news that night, and I still so appreciate them opening themselves up like that.

1. So many great things in sports—so much fun. The 2000 Olympics in Sydney had me out of the country for about a month, and I made a deal with producer Tom Leonard, “If I’m still here and you’re here, I get to bring my wife and girls to Salt Lake City in 2002. I’m very much a family person, and being away from my girls when they were that young wasn’t great.” Well, we went, and I can still say to my girls, “I got you to the Olympics.” Through sports, I also got to know Herb Brooks, who was a longtime hero of mine before his untimely death.