How did the Minnesota Star Tribune get its start?

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A burgeoning Minneapolis had just incorporated as a city in 1867 when the first edition of the Minneapolis Tribune rolled off the presses. The new broadsheet began with an apology.

“The lines being down most all day yesterday, we are without the greater part of our dispatches,” the newspaper reported atop its front page. “No one can regret this accident more than ourselves.”

It was (mostly) all up from there. As the company marks a new era as the Minnesota Star Tribune, it was the perfect time to tackle a question about its history. Curious Minnesota superfan Sharon Carlson asked the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project: “How did the Star Tribune get its start?”

Carlson, who lives in Andover, remembers getting angry as a kid because her parents would read the paper “all day long” on Sundays. She now does the same thing, and thinks of the newspaper as “a rare form of education and entertainment.”

There isn’t one origin story, but several. The Minnesota Star Tribune is the result of many newspaper mergers over the decades. Its primary forbears are the Tribune, the Minneapolis Journal (founded in 1878) and the Minneapolis Star (founded in 1920).

From the early days covering a plague of locusts to the “romance” of Minneapolis’ Newspaper Row, these papers bore witness to the biggest events in Minnesota history.

Minneapolis was home to about 7,000 people when the Tribune launched. The streets were unpaved, the sidewalks were wood planks, and there was “no fire department, no sanitary system, no trained nurses, no city water supply,” wrote former editor Bradley L. Morison in “Sunlight on Your Doorstep: The Minneapolis Tribune’s First Hundred Years.”

The founding publisher was Col. William S. King, who had run a weekly newspaper called the Atlas and was known for his anti-slavery editorials. He later became a U.S. representative and the namesake of Minneapolis’ Kingfield neighborhood. The paper’s stakeholders were prominent businessmen and civic leaders, including Dorilus Morrison, who had just been elected Minneapolis’ first mayor.

In that first issue, the nascent Tribune explained there would be no Monday editions (“to avoid Sabbath work”). The Journal’s founders also pledged to promote the state’s common interests and the “common benefit of the great loyal Republican Party.”

The Tribune soon had prominent office space in Minneapolis’ first City Hall, erected at the intersection of Nicollet and Hennepin Avenues (Bridge Square) in 1873. “The place used to get so cold the paste froze on the sheets before we could get the telegraph copy upstairs,” former Tribune editor Charles E. Russell later wrote.

In those early days, reporters would write out their accounts in longhand and workers in the print room were charged with deciphering even the worst handwriting and setting it into type.

The Tribune’s buildings burned down twice — in 1889, killing seven men when the printing plant was destroyed, and again 10 years later. Still, it didn’t miss an issue.

The Minneapolis Evening Journal was established in 1878 by what the Pioneer Press described at the time as a “plucky trio of young journalists,” who had spent that summer chatting at a boarding house about the need for another paper in the city. They chipped in about $50 a piece and took out a loan to get the operation running.

“The material end of our enterprise was meager — some lead pencils and scratch paper,” Journal co-founder Frank E. Curtis wrote in 1928. “We owned no equipment. We had a few fonts of borrowed type and forms in a composing room.”

In the first issue, the editors acknowledged in a front-page editorial that they faced long odds, noting that “four evening papers have risen and failed in Minneapolis during the past five years.” They were also offended by a notice about the Journal that had appeared in the Tribune.

“Good competition is to the Tribune as water is to fire, and hence the Journal’s appearance is anything but agreeable,” the editors wrote. The Journal, too, swore to be “thoroughly Republican.”

The founders paid $1,500 for a press and spent $20 a week for a correspondent in Chicago to send national news by telegraph, co-founder Clarence A. French told a Journal columnist. The fledgling operation found support from prominent civic leader George Brackett — a former mayor of the young city.

“When we struck a hard place, Mr. Brackett was pretty sure to come around with some remark like, ‘Well, boys, how are you getting along?’” French said. “And if we were in straits, he helped out when he could with a little of the needed cash.”

A major fire in 1880 destroyed the Journal’s printing plant. The paper did beat the odds, though, and would go on to fight with the Tribune for Minneapolis readers’ attention well into the next century.

When its first issue appeared in 1920, the Minnesota Daily Star promised to be the complete opposite of the Tribune and Journal. It began as a labor newspaper, collectively owned by its 20,000 stockholders and with a masthead proclaiming to be “published not for profit but to promote the general welfare.”

Its founding president was Herbert Gaston, a journalist with ties to the populist Nonpartisan League, an alliance of farmers that called for state-run facilities like mills and grain elevators. Thomas Van Lear, the former Socialist mayor of Minneapolis, was vice president.

“Workers Put Ban On Loop,” blared a headline atop the paper’s first edition. Unionized workers were boycotting downtown businesses after a judge stopped people from picketing outside a movie theater.

That first issue also introduced a regular column by “well-known educator, wife and mother” Elizabeth Campbell. A Labor party backer, she criticized prominent suffragists for supporting the main political parties.

“Has the passion for justice and human liberty drained out of them in the tragically long struggle for the freedom of their sex?” she asked.

The Star went bankrupt just four years later, after enduring a boycott by area business owners. The paper’s new owners made it politically independent and gave it a more local focus. It also got a new name — the Minneapolis Daily Star.

There was plenty of competition on “Newspaper Row.” Starting at the turn of the century, a single stretch of 4th Street between Nicollet and Marquette avenues was home to the newsrooms of the Tribune, the Minneapolis Times (the Tribune’s shorter-lived sister paper), the Journal and other smaller papers.

Former Tribune editor-in-chief Thomas Dillon recalled the “glamor” and “romance” of the street, where editors wore silk top hats and “not a few reporters” carried canes.

“In the noon hour the block was literally jammed with printers, reporters, pressmen, stereotypers, engravers, mailers, an organized inky confraternity like the trade guilds of old,” he wrote.

Reporters would gather in the “dark mahogany cavern” of nearby Schiek’s Cafe, often passing celebrities outside the Metropolitan Opera House’s stage door, Morison wrote.

“The reporters fought each other for the news; the editors cursed each other in the columns, and the teamsters yelled and swung at each other for parking space in the alley in back of the building,” graduate student Ted Curtis Smythe wrote in a 1967 history of the Journal. “Minneapolis journalism was a lusty, swinging existence.”

There were plenty of interesting characters, from scribes to company brass.

“Pipe-smoking girl reporter” Lorena Hickock covered Gopher football games and murder trials for the Tribune, Morison wrote, while husband and wife Delos and Maud Lovelace (who would become famous for her Betsy-Tacy books) worked as a night editor and a features reporter.

In 1921, Fred Murphy took over for his brother William as publisher of the Tribune. He had started in the press room as an apprentice decades earlier.

“It is hard and exacting work, in which one breathes an atmosphere saturated with ink, thrown off in microscopic globules from the spinning rollers and cylinders,” Dillon wrote in a 1939 company history. “The pores of the skin are filled with ink and soap and water are without avail. Hair and eyelashes are black with the mixture of carbon and oil.”

Murphy was obsessed with diversifying Minnesota agriculture. He even ran a farm to develop new livestock breeds in the Red River Valley. “Reporters would have loved him more if he had loved pure-bred dairy herds less,” wrote Morison.

The media scene began to shift starting in 1935, when the Cowles publishing family from Des Moines bought the Star. Four years later, they bought the Journal and combined the two into one paper.

The Star-Journal then merged with the Tribune in 1941, creating the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co. The Cowles’ “editorial formula” was to be impartial, include “all sides of important controversial issues” and to clearly separate news reporting from opinion and editorial writing, Morison wrote.

The days of Newspaper Row were over, and most employees left their old rolltop desks behind to move into a renovated building on Portland Avenue that had originally been built for the Star.

Former Journal columnist A.J. Russell described watching one of the paper’s janitors tearing up as he looked at the vacant lot where the Journal building once stood on 4th Avenue. His tears best expressed “the general sentiment of any surviving member of the Old Newspaper Guard today,” Russell wrote in his 1943 memoir “Goodbye Newspaper Row.”

The Cowleses published both the evening Minneapolis Star and the morning Minneapolis Tribune until 1982, when the newsrooms combined into one paper called the Minneapolis Star & Tribune. The paper became the Star Tribune five years later — billing itself as “Newspaper of the Twin Cities” — and opened a printing plant in the North Loop.

The newsroom moved to its current home in Capella Tower in 2015, when the Portland Avenue building was demolished to build Commons Park.

In August 2024, following decades of upheaval and change in the company and the industry, the company entered its latest era. It would now be the Minnesota Star Tribune, representing the “Heart and Voice of the North.”

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