When the first edition of the Minneapolis Tribune rolled off the press in 1867, Minneapolis had just been declared a city. The new broadsheet began with an apology.
“Since the lines were down almost all day yesterday, we are missing most of our shipments,” the newspaper reported on its front page. “No one can regret this accident more than we do.”
From there, it was (mostly) uphill. As the company begins a new era as the Minnesota Star Tribune, it was the perfect time to address a question about its history. Curious Minnesota superfan Sharon Carlson asked the Strib’s reader-driven reporting project, “How did the Star Tribune get started?”
Carlson, who lives in Andover, remembers getting angry as a child because her parents read the newspaper “all day long” on Sundays. Today, she does the same and considers the newspaper “a rare form of education and entertainment.”
There is not just one story of its origins, but several. The Minnesota Star Tribune is the result of many newspaper mergers over the decades. Its most important predecessors are the Tribune, the Minneapolis Journal (founded in 1878) and the Minneapolis Star (founded in 1920).
From covering a plague of locusts in their early days to the “romance” of the Minneapolis newspaper line, these newspapers have witnessed the greatest events in Minnesota history.
When the Tribune opened, Minneapolis had a population of about 7,000. The streets were unpaved, the sidewalks were made of wood planks, and there was “no fire department, no sanitation system, no trained nurses, no municipal water system,” wrote former editor Bradley L. Morison in “Sunlight on Your Doorstep: The Minneapolis Tribune’s First Hundred Years.”
