Great journalism often begins with a question, and Minnesota Star Tribune journalists asked themselves, and their readers, many questions as they recrafted coverage and product strategies that drove our our year-long transformation.
ELECTIONS 2024: Our politics team partnered with Trusting News to navigate our polarized electorate. The team sought to be transparent about their work on our site and in social media and developed reader panels (hundreds volunteered!). We partnered with other news organizations to create The Minnesota Poll on everything from the presidential race to their confidence in our governor and the election itself. We developed a Voter’s Guide, one of our highest traffic pieces of the year, measured polarization and visited one of the state’s most evenly divided cities. On election night, we presented live results in new, informative ways, and quickly offered in-depth analysis to explain the votes.
ENGAGING INTERACTIVES: We also sought to tap into issues that brought Minnesotans together with innovations that were useful – and fun: We helped readers understand their neighborhood real estate market, encouraged them to enter our holiday cookie contest or simply graze through our 100 top winners. Our “Curious Minnesota” initiative sparked a question from a reader: What is the oldest tree in Minnesota? The answer produced an immersive explanation – and a podcast episode. And as Minnesota great Joe Mauer was headed into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, our team wondered what we might learn if we could visualize the sum of his career in one place?
INVESTIGATIONS/ENTERPRISE: We combined creativity and curiosity to produce some of our strongest enterprise journalism, including a multi-part project that revealed the failures of the charter schools in Minnesota, where the charter-school movement was born. The package sparked 22 proposals for charter school reform and earned a first place Headliner Award. Another data-fueled project revealed the roots and outcomes of the stark income inequality gap in Minnesota, while yet another sought to determine if companies were complying with Minnesota’s ban on PFAS-containing products, the toughest in the country.
PRODUCTS: We launched a hallmark morning newsletter that is now our most popular: Essential Minnesota. Likewise, as we expanded our coverage throughout Minnesota, we launched and revamped newsletters for each region — from Duluth to Mankato – hand-crafted by the reporters living in those communities. Meanwhile, we expanded our social media presence and audience across all of our coverage, from sports to investigations, from breaking news to pop culture.
And we launched our first narrative podcast, “Ghost of a Chance”, which followed reporter Eric Roper’s obsession to learn about a couple who once lived in his home. It became a journey that revealed painful truths of Minneapolis’s racial past and sparked community conversations about racial reckoning as the five-year commemoration of the murder of George Floyd approached.
Our transformation attracted attention from our peers: The New York Times called us a “bright spot” in the industry. Poynter’s media business analyst said we “strike a great balance between continuity and being bold about embracing change.”
