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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

John Ramos has an affinity for the muckraking journalists of a century ago. It’s a style he brings to his reporting for the Duluth Monitor, the six-year-old online news site where he does all the reporting.

He likes the idea of personal observation journalism practiced by turn of the 20th century journalists, their “crusading zeal to clean up the corruption,” said Ramos. “I don’t think I have that kind of corruption (in Duluth), but it's the same concept, just a zeal to clean it up, make everybody play fair, treat each other right."

Sitting in a Duluth coffee shop Ramos explained how he “backed into” journalism. His college degree was in natural resources. He worked jobs from maintaining trails to driving a taxi. But he always enjoyed writing. 

"So I just started writing humor columns, and eventually started reporting, and found out that I was good at it and I liked it,” Ramos said. "I really just thought I was going to be a humor columnist. That was the extent of my ambitions.”

That changed when Ramos started covering local meetings and found he was often the only reporter in attendance. “It just became glaringly obvious that there's a huge gap in reporting,” he said. “So many things go by that should be reported on, but just aren’t.”

His approach hasn’t won many friends in local government. He’s had a restraining order filed against him and a local official once called the police after Ramos demanded access to public data. He seems to enjoy the conflict.

“My wife says if anything happens to me the list of suspects will be too long to know where to start,” he said with a laugh.

The 54-year-old Ramos started the Monitor in 2019 with free stories, hoping to earn money from ads. In 2024 he switched to a subscription model and he’s happy with the response. There are currently 460 subscribers. 

He’s the only full-time reporter. His wife Camila is his editor and, he said, his toughest critic. She’s a “hard, hard, cold, cold editor. I’ll get up in the morning, bounce out of bed fresh as a daisy, ready to go to get that article out by noon. It’ll be (done) three days later,” Ramos laughed.

Ramos agreed his style can be aggressive and edgy. He said he gets more pushy if he’s nervous or feeling stonewalled by local officials.  

"I'm nice until I sense that they're just making stuff up on the fly, which happens so often,” he said. “I'm pretty well-versed in data practice laws and things like that, open meeting laws. And if people are just making stuff up, I just can't stand it, and I do get edgy."

Ramos understands his style is likely to make enemies, but he’s more interested in getting the story than building relationships with local politicians.

"Sometimes there are people that I wish would like me that don't. So it kind of hurts a little bit,” Ramos acknowledged, “But there's no way I can let it bother me professionally, because this stuff that I'm doing is just bare knuckles, metaphorically speaking, type of reporting. If people don't like me, that's fine. I don't care."

Ramos thrives on investigative work, but he also writes a lot of stories about the nuts and bolts of local government. He thinks readers need that information to help understand how their government works. 

While Ramos is indisputably brash, he can also laugh at himself. In June 2019, he appeared before the Duluth City Council to say he intended to make the Monitor the best news source in the city and predicted that in the next year he would break more substantial stories than the Duluth News Tribune and all local TV stations combined. 

"I don't think that panned out back then,” Ramos said with a rueful chuckle. “I don't think that came true, but I think if I had said the same thing a year ago from right now, that would be true. I've broken some big ones."

His work has won statewide investigative journalism awards the past two years and he is happy with the readers’ response to his work. Someday Ramos would like to have a storefront office for the Monitor, and if his subscription base grows to 1,000 he will hire a full-time reporter.

"The people do seem to be responding to the more aggressive, more in your face, type of really pushing for questions style,” he said.  

"It helps me get answers, and people appreciate getting answers, which helps me sell what I do.  I don't want it to be like just entertainment, although I have to admit, sometimes it's fun."

Dan Gunderson

Author

John Ramos started the Duluth Monitor in 2019 with an aggressive approach to reporting local news. His reporting has upset some local officials but he says readers appreciate his muckraking style.

Duluth’s one-man newsroom embraces ‘bare-knuckles’ journalism

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