Pressroom Podcast

Duluth is full of young entrepreneurs making their mark on this city. And Rachelle Rahn is no exception.

Rahn, owner of Duluth Kombucha, started making the popular fermented tea in her kitchen when buying it in the store became too expensive. She never thought it would grow into a business with big plans for the future.

Rahn give us a lesson on kombucha, its mother SCOBY and what it takes to be an entrepreneur in Duluth. She also shares some of her favorite (and least favorite) flavor combos.

Named the Rising Star of the Year at the 2018 Explore Minnesota Tourism Conference, Dan Hartman, director of Duluth's Glensheen Historic Estate, joins the podcast this week to talk about how he turned an old mansion along Lake Superior into a fun place where people want to hang out.

He and his team have taken Glensheen from 61,000 visitors a year to 141,000 and the mansion is now the number one visited house museum in the Midwest, beating out Chicago last year.

Hartman shares his ideas for the future of Duluth tourism as well as a few instances where he was spooked by unexplainable happenings at the mansion.

Shortly after being diagnosed in August, right before the school year, with an aggressive form of breast cancer, Cloquet High School art teacher Julie Deters turned to Facebook and put herself out there with her cancer journey.

"I'm a teacher. I've been teaching for 26 years and it is in me to teach people so that's why I guess I put it out there ultimately," Deters said.

The most noticeable posts where the photos her daughter Sylvie took of the various hairstyles Deters tried out while her hair started to fall out due to chemotherapy treatments. And when the maroon mohawk made its final appearance, Sylvie shaved her mother's head and covered the blank canvas with henna tattoos and makeup.

Hear Deters talk about her journey and the life lessons she has learned along the way - the most important being learning how to accept and receive help from people.

Even if you aren't a cross country skiing fan chances are you still heard Chad Salmela's famous gold medal call during the Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

While he declined to replicate the "Here comes Diggins" call for us, Duluth's Salmela did give us some behind-the-scenes info on the race that made Minnesotan Jessie Diggins and teammate Kikkan Randall the first U.S. gold medalists in the team sprint, male or female.

Salmela, cross country coach at St. Scholastica, shares what it was like to be a part of that historic race and how it feels to be compared to Al Michaels' "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" call from 1980.

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Another podcast first happening this week - recording in front of a live audience.

Journalism students from the University of Minnesota Duluth joined us as we recorded today's episode with artist and musician Emma Rustan, better known as Ingeborg von Agassiz.

Hear how the electronic folk singer/songwriter came up with her name, what inspires her, and what the backstories are to a few of the songs on her debut album "O, giver of Dreams," which will be released on Spotify and iTunes on March 1.

She is an activist to keep factory farms away from Lake Superior, she wrote a cookbook based from her blog and she drove all the way from Bayfield to the "big city" to tell us about her interesting life.

This week Mary Dougherty talks about her advocacy (which has now led to a career), how her family of seven ended up in the small town of Bayfield, and how her first cookbook "Life in a Northern Town," which offers a mix of essay about the south shore, along with vivid photography and lots of recipes came to be.

Jody Kujawa's life changed after playing a 600-pound shut-in in Renegade's production of "The Whale." He started to notice that some of his own symptoms matched those of the ailing protagonist.

Sure enough, he was diagnosed with a heart condition that has changed his life.

Hear Kujawa talk about the day he was in the emergency room with ten doctors surrounding him and the changes he has made since that day to his diet and lifestyle in order to drop over 100 pounds.

In case you missed it, there was a big football game in Minneapolis this weekend. One of our sports reporters was there to capture the fan experience.

This week, Jon Nowacki talks about the game, the fans, the overall spectacle and of course the food of Super Bowl LII at US Bank Stadium.

After the Minnesota Vikings lost the NFC Championship to the Philadelphia Eagles, local documentary filmmaker Mike Scholtz felt like he needed to cheer up his sport-loving friends with the free release of his documentary "Lost Conquest."

His documentary explores Viking culture in Minnesota and the beliefs people have about Vikings having settled here. But archaeologists say it's all folklore and none of it ever happened.

So really it has nothing to do with the Minnesota Vikings football team, but we're sure you'll find it more entertaining than that game we don't speak of.

Back from a month-long stint in Kazakhstan, we catch up with former KBJR investigative reporter and news director Barbara Reyelts to see what retirement looks like for her.

We find out what she was doing halfway around the world, whether or not she misses the news biz and what her biggest pet peeve is about journalists.

Also, Brady admits the only thing he knows about Kazakhstan is the movie "Borat."