Star Tribune

What you're reading

The Star Tribune is Minnesota's daily newspaper of record, headquartered in downtown Minneapolis. It traces to the 1867 Minneapolis Daily Tribune and current form to the 1982 merger of the Star and Tribune. It has been privately owned since 2014 by Glen Taylor, a Minnesota businessman and former Republican state senator.

The paper covers Minneapolis, St. Paul, the broader Twin Cities metro, greater Minnesota, the Minnesota state government in St. Paul, the Vikings/Twins/Wild/Timberwolves, agriculture (Minnesota is a major US ag state), the Iron Range mining industry, and Mayo Clinic. The Star Tribune has won seven Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2013 Editorial Writing prize and the 2020 Breaking News Photography prize for coverage of the George Floyd protests. Daily circulation remains among the larger US metro dailies, and the paper publishes a substantial Sunday print product. Audience runs in the low millions of monthly digital readers.

Ownership & funding

Star Tribune Media Company (Glen Taylor, private). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription-plus-advertising under independent private ownership by Glen Taylor produces a relatively stable incentive structure — no chain ownership cycle, no public-company quarterly pressure, and no Alden hedge-fund cost-cutting profile — but Taylor's prior political background as a Republican state senator created initial editorial-independence questions that the newsroom has managed through firewall procedures. The Sunday print product remains revenue-meaningful in a way it isn't at many US metros, which helps fund a larger reporting staff than digital-only Minneapolis outlets could sustain. Taylor sold the paper in 2024 to a group led by Steven Star — the ownership structure is in flux as of this writing.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Star Tribune at Center with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places Star Tribune at Center because the paper's news coverage of Minnesota politics consistently treats both parties as accountability targets — its statehouse reporting has been tough on Republican legislative leadership and on Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) governors and statewide officials, and its Minneapolis city government coverage has been hard on the city's Democratic establishment from the 2020 protests through the police-reform debates that followed. The paper's editorial board endorses candidates from both parties depending on the race, which is unusual for a metro daily in 2026.

Where lean shows up: the paper's coverage of immigration, the George Floyd story, and Minneapolis policing reform reflects a broadly center-left framing on the underlying issues even when the reporting is critical of progressive officials, and the editorial board's positions on policy (climate, expanded health-care access, gun laws) sit clearly on the center-left. The High factuality rating reflects the Pulitzer track record, careful sourcing on investigative pieces, transparent corrections and a long-tenured beat-reporter bench that produces fewer errors than newsrooms with high turnover.

Editorial vs news side

Standard daily-newspaper split. The news desk covers Minnesota, the Twin Cities and the Minnesota statehouse as straight beats with relatively balanced framing. The editorial board operates separately and runs editorials, endorsements and signed columns; the column roster is genuinely mixed, with conservative voices alongside liberal ones at a higher ratio than at most US metro dailies. For the bias rating, the news pages run close to Center and the opinion operation doesn't pull the composite far in either direction — the net is Center rather than Lean Left.

Why we include them in nwsly

Minnesota daily of record; news desk straight.

The Star Tribune gives nwsly the Minnesota slot and the Upper Midwest vantage point that no other source in the lineup provides. Minnesota matters as a politically distinct state (DFL Democratic tradition, not standard-issue national Democratic Party), as a key Midwest agricultural state, as the home of Mayo Clinic and 3M, and as the site of the George Floyd story and its aftermath. The paper's accountability tradition on both parties makes it a useful Center anchor for Midwest political coverage that doesn't sort onto coastal frames.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Star Tribune

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