It’s been nearly 15 years since Rick Kupchella did any shoe-leather reporting. He picked a doozy of a story to make his comeback.
“A Precarious State,” which premieres at 7 p.m. on five ABC affiliates in the area, looks at how Minneapolis has suffered more than most other major cities since the pandemic, with a significant exodus of businesses and an increased fear of crime.
“These are far from the best of times,” Kupchella says near the start of the one-hour documentary that uses stark statistics and sobering testimonials to back up his premise.
Kupchella left KARE 11 in 2009, spending much of his 20 years at the NBC affiliate as a weekend anchor and investigative reporter. Since that departure, he has been busy launching businesses like the online-news network Bring Me The News, which he sold in 2015, and the digital-strategic firm GoKart Labs, which was acquired by West Monroe in 2019.
He was drawn back to journalism after traveling across the country and realizing that the Twin Cities was in worse shape than other metropolitan areas.
“It struck me all the more that this is not like the other places,” he said Wednesday in a Zoom interview. “We were notably different.”
During the two years he spent on the project, Kupchella recruited about 30 people, including senior producer Robbie Gordon, who has worked extensively with Diane Sawyer. Experts featured in the film include George John, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, real estate developer Jim Rubin and Gene Pelowski, a former Minnesota state representative.
Kupchella declined to share how much he spent buying an hour of prime-time television on the ABC affiliates KSTP (Twin Cities), WDIO (Duluth), KAAL (Rochester), WDAY (Fargo) and KSFY (Sioux Falls). But he said the rates were cheaper than it used to be when he was at KARE and it has turned out to be a great way to get the word out about the project.
