MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Star Tribune has won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for its newsroom-wide coverage of a shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic church last summer.

Marjorie Miller, administrator of the Pulitzers, said in announcing this year’s awards Monday that the coverage included “powerful stories marked by thoroughness and compassion.”

It was 8:27 a.m. on Aug. 27 when a shooter opened fire on children, teachers and parents during a return-to-school service for Annunciation Catholic school, which is connected to the church.

In its application to the Pulitzer board for work produced in 2025, the Star Tribune noted the newsroom decided early on it wouldn’t let the shooting be easily forgotten as just one more American tragedy. Instead, the staff would “hold up Annunciation’s pain and ask our readers to reckon with it.”

Several reporters live in the south Minneapolis neighborhood near the school or attend church at Annunciation. One editor’s child was in the service.

“For the journalists in our newsroom, it was personal and up-close,” said Kathleen Hennessey, editor and senior vice president of the Minnesota Star Tribune. “I’d be crazy to say in a newsroom full of parents, it didn’t hit a certain nerve.”

The application for a Pulitzer tells the story of a newsroom grappling with community shock and grief while reporting the story.

When shots broke out that morning, reporter Jeff Day – who heard the gunfire from a nearby backyard – called 911. Then he ran to the scene. Minutes later, an editor driving north to the newsroom posted a message on Slack, the newsroom’s communication channel, of a swarm of law enforcement vehicles heading south.

By 8:50 a.m., three reporters and three photographers were sent to Annunciation, where photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii captured the image of a distraught, barefoot mother – shoes in hand – running toward the church. That photograph was shown around the world.

By 9:20 a.m., the newsroom published a liveblog. By 10:15 a.m., reporters had confirmed the deaths of two children.

“We felt responsible immediately to tell this story,” Hennessey said. “To confirm the facts, to get to the scene, to make the pictures, to make the video, to be up close and to be there.”

Over the course of the day, reporters and photographers documented agonizing and heroic acts, from grief-stricken parents meeting at the school to an interview with a 10-year-old survivor.

The newsroom also got to work seeking to determine the shooter’s motivation. The team used AI to identify the language used in hundreds of pages of the shooter’s writings. Then the team asked Russian language scholars to verify the translation.

The Star Tribune last won a Pulitzer, also for breaking news, in 2021 for coverage the prior summer of the death of George Floyd and the civil unrest afterward. It also was a finalist for investigative reporting in 2022 and 2023.

Similar to Floyd’s death, the Annunciation shooting and its aftermath – from political debates in St. Paul over gun control to the stages of grief for families – have been the focus of coverage in the months afterward.

“This award, I believe, looks at a seven-day window,” Hennessey said. “But the truth is we stayed with this story long after that.”

The news organization used new journalistic tools, such as the company’s AI Lab, to uncover information on the Annunciation shooter’s online writings. But the old standby of shoe-leather reporting and earning trust from hesitant sources – including survivors, including many of them children, and their families – was critical to the reporting effort.

“We’re grateful to the Annunciation families for trusting us with these stories,” Hennessey said. “I know we’re all thinking about them as the newsroom gets this recognition.”

Douglas Kearney, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, was a finalist in the poetry category for his “I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always.”

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