Just a month after winning a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting, The Minnesota Star Tribune will offer buyouts and lay off up to 15% of its staff, the company said Tuesday.
The Star Tribune has 495 employees, including a newsroom of 200 journalists. The cuts will affect every department and the newsroom will be reduced to 175 people, the Star Tribune said.
CEO Steve Grove told employees in an email that the company will also explore becoming a nonprofit owned by a foundation. The newspaper is currently owned by Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, who bought it in 2014.
“Grove said Taylor has ‘only ever invested money in its future and never once taken a profit from it,’ but that it was time to make a long-term plan for the organization’s future stewardship,” the Star Tribune’s reporting says.
Last year, the Star Tribune laid off 125 employees when it closed its Minnesota printing facility and moved its printing to Des Moines, Iowa.
In May, the Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of a Catholic school shooting in August 2025.
“But vital journalism is not a guarantee of profitability,” reporter Christopher Vondracek wrote.
Read the full story here.
So both the Star-Tribune and the AJC are cutting 15% of their workforces.
However, one is exploring a nonprofit structure to insulate itself from its right-wing billionaire owner, the other kept their right-wing billionaire owner but went fully digital.
Would love to see they diverge from here.
— Alex Ip 葉清霖 (@alexip718.com) June 3, 2026 at 3:44 AM
Minnesota has unfortunately been the site had some of the most consequential news events of the last year, and the journalists at the MN Star Tribune stepped up enormously, even taking home a Pulitzer. Now they're about to go through another painful round of cuts. www.startribune.com/minnesota-st…
— Jessica Lussenhop (@jlussenhop.bsky.social) June 3, 2026 at 9:28 AM
