Owners’ daughter takes over South Dakota Magazine

YANKTON, S.D. (AP) - Katie Hunhoff has experienced South Dakota Magazine ever since she was a young girl.

“I remember when my parents came to pick me up from school and my brother ran up to me with a magazine and said, ’Look, the magazine’s here!’ and at the time I was like, ’What magazine?’” Katie told the Yankton Press and Dakotan (https://bit.ly/1r1It7V ). “For the last year, my parents had been creating and laying out the magazine on our kitchen table. That was when I was in first grade, so that was a long time ago.”

Katie’s parents, Bernie and Myrna Hunhoff, founded South Dakota Magazine in 1985. Beginning this month, ownership of the magazine has been transferred to Katie and childhood friend Heidi Marsh.

Marsh said her experience in college helped keep her coming back to the magazine.

“I started out as an intern at the magazine when I was going to college,” Marsh said. “My husband and I moved to Omaha, and we wanted to come back to the prairie and come back home. It was a good fit for me to come back here in the marketing position at that point.”

Bernie Hunhoff said the decision stemmed from a desire to pull back a little bit, and the opportunity was there.

“I feel like I’m good for a few more years, but I feel I’m at that awkward time when I know that I probably can’t keep going at this level forever,” he said. “And I just felt that if the right opportunity presented itself with the right folks, it’d be good to find that future generation of publishers. Katie and Heidi actually approached me - they had a publishing related business idea in mind and they wanted to know if they could do that as employees of the magazine and it kind of grew from there. I said, ’Well if you want to get in the business and be partners, maybe this is the time to start talking about how you can be magazine publishers.’”

Marsh said the staff has been a huge help as ownership has been transferred over the summer.

“Our staff of 12 is fantastic,” she said. “We have the best writers and designers, I think, in all of the state really. This transition has been really welcoming to them. I think other options would’ve been to sell out to some big media conglomerate and that’s something that we just (didn’t want). We felt like it still needed to be, in a sense, family owned, because Katie and I feel like we’re family and the staff is part of our family too. That’s really made the transition run very smoothly. And Bernie’s not too hard on us either.”

Katie said it almost feels the same as it has the 12 years she’s been working for the magazine.

“That’s the great thing about this transition - it doesn’t even feel like one,” she said. “For me, that’s been a huge comfort because it’s such a big change for our family and everything. I really feel like there haven’t been any changes yet, and that’s really surprising.”

She added the goals of South Dakota Magazine are the same from this point on.

“We still have the same goals - telling really great stories and entertaining our readers,” she said. “Every time they get the magazine in the mail, we want them to be wowed by it and we’re just focusing on those stories.”

Katie said they also intend to look into expanding into book and product options in the future alongside the magazine.

Bernie said this transition has given him a chance to realize how unique the magazine has been at nearly 30 years in publication.

“I’ve been so busy since 1985 with the magazine that I haven’t had time to think about it,” he said. “But when you see the numbers (45,000 subscribers and 180,000 readers), it’s grown beyond anything we could imagine, and that’s because South Dakota is a unique state to publish a magazine in. Much bigger and wealthier states really struggle to put out a state magazine like we do, and we’ve just been blessed with support, mostly from readers, but also from advertisers and it’s been a lot of fun to be a part of that.”

But Bernie, who’s in the process of running for a Senate seat in the state legislature, isn’t totally walking away from the magazine.

“I’ll probably be poking around, doing some writing and photography and I’ve been busy in public service,” he said. “I think I’ll still be plenty busy, I’m just trying to get it down under 60-70 hours (per week) down to a more reasonable time so I can get in the boat once in a while.”

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Information from: Yankton Press and Dakotan, https://www.yankton.net/