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I DON'T WATCH NEWSROOM brand campaigns for slogans or logos. I watch them for signals.
Signals about where journalism is headed. Signals about who understands the moment. Signals about whether a legacy news organization is adapting — or merely decorating the same old house.
That’s why Tuesday’s livestream from The Minnesota Star Tribune is worth more than a casual click. It wasn’t a commercial. It was an unusually candid window into what it looks like when a modern regional newsroom tries to cover a national story that is unfolding right outside its doors, in real time, with real fear, real anger, real misinformation, real bodies.
“This is a moment that demands truth, clarity, and fearlessness,” moderator Allison Kaplan told viewers at the start. That line landed because it wasn’t delivered like marketing. It was delivered like a premise. And then the newsroom tried to earn it.
Kaplan didn’t spend her opening minutes playing it safe. She thanked viewers “for joining us over your lunch hour” and “for submitting so many thoughtful questions,” then pivoted directly into what many news organizations still struggle to say out loud: journalism is work, it costs money, and it requires backing if you expect it to be done well and safely.
“Our Star Tribune newsroom has mobilized to report every aspect of what’s been going on as it unfolds and changes in real time,” she said. “Many of you have asked how you can support this work. The answer is easy. Subscribe, get a digital subscription to the Star Tribune and consider making a donation to our Star Tribune local news fund … your support goes directly to journalists, giving them the resources, protection, and tools they need to more accurately report and be responsible in moments like this.”
That’s blunt. It’s also honest. And in a time when many newspapers seem allergic to explaining themselves, it was refreshing to see a newsroom speak plainly about what it needs, without preening.
The panelists weren’t executives. They were working reporters — Jeff Day, Sofia Barnett, and Richard Tsong-Taatari — describing what it looks like to chase truth through chaos while everyone else is chasing heat.
Kaplan set the frame early, referencing the moment many Minnesotans point to as an ignition point: “I think for a lot of people this became real … with the fatal shooting of Renee Goode.” But she also asked a better question: when did you feel the precipice? When did you realize this wasn’t just a flare-up but an era?
Day answered like a courts reporter who has spent too long watching the legal system collide with politics. “I think that for a lot of us in the newsroom, it really began last January,” he said. “So at the start of the Trump administration’s second term, there was already things that were happening around immigration that were raising intense levels of scrutiny in our newsroom right away.”
He didn’t claim clairvoyance. He described a slow ratcheting: “The level of intensity really grew, I would say late last year when there began to be rumblings that I think we all were trying to chase down and verify that there was going to be a dramatic increase in immigration enforcement taking place in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
Barnett’s answer was more street-level — the kind of timeline you only get when you’re standing near the scene instead of reading about it later. “For me, when I noticed things start to ramp up … that was one of the bigger notable actions that we had seen coming into fall and approaching the start of Operation Metro Surge,” she said, describing early raids and the way communities began building rapid-response networks. “That rang a lot of alarm bells for a lot of people and marked some of the earlier raids that we started to see.”
Then Tsong-Taatari, like many photographers who’ve had to become half-reporter, half-intelligence analyst just to know where to be, described how much of modern breaking-news coverage now runs through Signal channels. “I started paying attention in December and signed up for Signal and started monitoring it, and it was quite a learning curve,” he said. “I had to figure out what were just rumors or just chatter and it’s kind of a skill to learn how to interpret it.”
That sentence is the quiet truth about 2026 journalism: the raw material comes in fast, messy, emotional and often wrong. The job is to sift it, verify it, and then publish what can be proven — not what happens to be loudest.
Tsong-Taatari recalled a construction-site raid in Chanhassen that made the escalation tangible. “Two workers were stranded in near zero temperatures in the rafters,” he said. “They were framers and one couldn’t take the hypothermia and came down and the other one held out until ice was basically scared away by the protestors or … just retreated.”
That’s not a press release. That’s a field report.
Kaplan also did something important: she treated visuals as evidence, not garnish. She asked Tsong-Taatari about a photograph that many viewers had already seen — a man pinned on the ground and pepper-sprayed at close range — and pressed for the “how” behind it.
“It was another instance where I reacted to a signal to chatter,” he said. “I was in the neighborhood because I heard that the neighborhood was very active.” Then he described the rapid escalation that images flatten but bodies remember: “Tensions escalated … and that was kind of like the breaking of the dam and things got really … the temperature got raised, people were being thrown to the ground.”
He explained why that particular frame hit so hard: “He kind of leaned down and did a very close range. I think that’s probably where the outrage … has emerged because of the deployment at such close range.”
Barnett followed with the kind of description that never makes it into a neat headline but explains everything about why bystanders panic and why misinformation thrives.
“It’s just a constant glare of noise, just screaming, yelling from protestors, from agents, whistles, sirens just sound everywhere,” she said. “I’ll be interviewing people and not even know what they’re saying … we need to step away. I can’t understand you. It’s that loud. And yeah, this scene is just total chaos.”
In a single paragraph, she explained why one shaky phone video can look like anything you want it to look like — and why the job of a trained reporter is to be there, to watch, and to keep asking what happened before and after the clip.
The audience asked the practical question journalists always get in volatile scenes: do you have gear? Are you protected? Barnett answered like someone who has learned the hard way that “press” is not a force field.
“We do have gear, we have personal protective equipment, we have gas masks, we have respirators, we have holistic goggles,” she said. “We are trying to be as safe as possible, but obviously … the more people who are getting out there, it’s more gear, more money, more of a hustle to get those things together.”
Tsong-Taatari added the blunt warning most people never hear until it’s too late: “You have to be careful to be not in the line of sight of fire from the agents because you could get hurt because of the deployment of non-lethal munitions. Tear gas. If you have any kind of health conditions like asthma, it could be very detrimental to your wellbeing.”
He was later asked to compare this to the aftermath of George Floyd. He didn’t do the easy thing — he didn’t inflate, he didn’t minimize. He contextualized.
“This is a very organized resistance,” he said. “I think a lot of the people who are being observers or have learned a lot from what happened during George Floyd, so you have the chats and signal neighborhoods have organized.”
Then he delivered a line that should sit with anyone who still thinks public safety is only about broken windows: “The damage to people’s sense of safety … the people who are in hiding who are afraid to come out, I mean that human cost has been tremendous.”
If the livestream had ended there — with vivid field reporting and human truth — it would have been worthwhile. But the most consequential section of the event was the one most casual viewers probably found least flashy: the numbers.
This is where the Star Tribune showed its value as an accountability institution, not merely a content factory.
Kaplan teed up the question: the federal government says 3,000. The reporting suggests something else. Day answered with the rarest form of newsroom transparency: he explained the method, the labor, and the limits.
“We are here representing the newsroom. We have a massive mobilization of staff that is taking part in this,” Day said, then named the kind of internal mechanics readers almost never see: “This was spearheaded by Jeff Hogar and our data analyst and Chris Megan, who’s our deportation reporter. And we had a lot of help from people just going down to courthouses to check records.”
He explained why they started with what was known as “the worst of the worst list,” then described how reporting actually works when officials won’t give you the data you need.
“When we first looked at it, there was about 280 names,” he said. “We really dug in on every single name. Who are they? Where were their charges? Were they federal? Were they state? Had they been convicted? Had they served time, had they done their probation?”
Then came the nuance that never survives a cable-news segment: “We found that there were a large percentage of those people had serious criminal charges. Many of them were either in prison or had served their time.”
He also described how the list itself was evolving — the kind of detail that tells you this isn’t propaganda, it’s process. “That number now is around 480 on that worst of the worst list,” Day said. “It’s an evolving number, a target that you try to understand and investigate as you can.”
He also didn’t dodge the disconnect between rhetoric and reality — which is where trust is either earned or lost. “Once you get past that worst of the worst, you start seeing what I would call more mundane, rudimentary charges,” he said. “Things like driving without revocation.”
That one example matters because it illustrates how public narratives are built. People hear “worst of the worst” and assume the streets are filled with violent fugitives. The reporting suggests a more complicated mix — and the job of journalism is to document the truth of that mix, not the political utility of it.
Kaplan underlined the point in a way more newsrooms should: “This is not coming from press releases. Nobody is handing you this information. This is work that journalists here at Star Tribune are doing to try to figure all of this out.”
Day responded with the kind of line you rarely hear said out loud on a newsroom livestream — and the kind of line that makes me believe he meant it: “To get those names was not an option that was available to us sitting in that press conference … it’s a hurdle.”
Then he said the quiet part with a little gallows humor that every courthouse reporter recognized immediately: “We do want to know. We love to know. It’s literally our favorite thing. I love, I’m a lunatic. I like sitting in court records at a computer terminal searching names.”
That’s not branding. That’s vocation.
The livestream also explained the newsroom’s operational reality: planning and enterprise reporting running in parallel with breaking news that can obliterate your calendar in 30 seconds.
“I often think of this as two parallel elements of a newsroom,” Day said. “You have planning … thoughtful discussions with editors around what we would … call enterprise stories … and then you have breaking news.”
Then the key line: “In this operation Metro Surge breaking news has often overwhelmed any sense of planning that you can have.”
He gave an example that matters because it shows what “mobilization” actually means: “When you think about the shooting of Alex Preddy that happened at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning, that’s not exactly high time for a newsroom to be active. And we had reporters who … live a block away. And so we had reporters on that scene instantaneously.”
That’s local journalism’s enduring advantage. Not ideology. Proximity.
The event didn’t shy away from uncertainty, either. Kaplan asked whether things were cooling down. Barnett admitted what honest reporters admit: they were still confirming.
“My signal chats have been a little less loud,” she said. “I don’t know what that means.” Tsong-Taatari offered his own field read: “I think there are fewer [agents], but definitely the circus-like atmosphere is gone because there’ve been two people who’ve been killed.”
Day described the sense he got from federal messaging shifts: “At bare minimum, we need to change the conversation that is happening … there was a serious problem happening here that led to a real sense of something has to change.”
Then came the legal question that will hang over Minnesota for years: could state charges be filed against federal agents in deadly-force cases?
Day, careful not to play lawyer on television, still gave viewers more substance than most public officials have managed. “It is such a unique situation,” he said, describing the extraordinary rhetoric from state leaders and the extraordinary legal uncertainty underneath it.
He explained the reporting muscle required just to identify who did what. “You have an officer identified not through federal channels, but just through good reporting by Star Tribune reporters,” he said, then gave credit where it belonged. Barnett cut in with a quick, human “Shout out Liz Sawyer.”
Day continued, describing the legal terrain without pretending it would be quick or clean: “This notion of state charges being filed against a federal officer for deadly use of force … opens up a legal Pandora’s box that at least in this state, is uncharted territory.”
Then, as if catching himself before he turned the livestream into a law seminar, he smiled at the clock: “I could talk about this quite literally for 35 minutes. I won’t.”
That’s a reporter who knows the depth of the story — and knows he has to get back to work.
There were also moments that clarified the modern media ecosystem — a world flooded with bystander video, activist footage, stitched-together clips, half-truths, and genuine evidence mixed together in the same feed.
Tsong-Taatari didn’t complain about it. He described it. “It’s a very complicated landscape to navigate,” he said. “Everyone has a voice from social media activists to … photo journalists like ourselves who are trying to be impartial and provide more visual evidence versus an opinion of what happened.”
Barnett made a similarly practical point: “The videos have been super useful for us to analyze … the moments leading up to just deciphering all of that.”
And she noted what readers may not realize exists inside the newsroom: “We have an amazing video team here who has stitched a lot of that together.”
But the most human part of the livestream — and the one that, frankly, separated it from the usual “newsroom-as-product” nonsense — was the conversation about trauma, the cumulative kind.
Barnett described interviewing children after the Annunciation shooting and the way trauma lives in the body. “Just listening to that trauma,” she said, “watching as an 8-year-old tries to recount something that they don’t really have the words for.”
Then she explained why this coverage is different: “The thing that’s different about the ice operations … is that they’re still ongoing. There is no endpoint in sight.”
She described living inside the uncertainty: “We’re trying to navigate lots of confusing, possibly conflicting misinformation … and that can be really challenging.”
And she delivered the line that explains why prolonged crises corrode people: “It’s just not … there’s no way to really step back and process it because it’s still happening.”
Tsong-Taatari, asked how he takes care of himself, answered with the weary wisdom of someone who has seen enough smoke and panic to know the bill always comes due. “After an intense day … I try to just go home and just rest,” he said. “Over the day, you build up a lot of stress that your body carries with you.”
He described learning to notice physical cues — “my jaw was very tight and clench” — and the methods that help him recover: “Getting a lot of sleep, talking to cohorts about what happened, it’s a good way to process that.”
Day brought the duality home — literally. “It’s been a very strange time,” he said. “My house … is about 900 feet from Annunciation when the gunfire went off,” a collision of “professional and personal.”
Then came the line that should end any debate about whether local reporters are detached outsiders: “My little three-year-old daughter goes to a Spanish immersion daycare, which have obviously been targeted … so we have community members that stand outside the door every night.”
He described the mental state of living and reporting in the same churn: “I have this thought in my head that I think about all the time that I’m on a wheel right now, I’m on a wheel, and at some point, that wheel is going to stop.”
And he didn’t romanticize it. “I am not good at it,” he said. “I’m trying to get better at it.”
That’s the part brand campaigns can’t manufacture: real people doing difficult work, while living inside the story, trying to stay accurate.
So here’s the signal I took from the Star Tribune’s livestream — and why it matters.
The best local journalism doesn’t beg for relevance. It demonstrates it. It shows you the reporting, the process, the verification, the limitations, the fear, the discipline, the humility, the grind. It shows you that journalism is not a vibe. It’s an act of public service carried out by humans with names, families, stress headaches, court-record tabs open at midnight, and respirators in their backpacks.
Newspapers have long been clumsy about explaining themselves. Many still treat the public like it should simply know why journalism matters, as if trust is inherited like a family cabin. It isn’t.
Trust is earned — again and again — in moments like this, when the stakes are high and the information environment is poisoned.
The Star Tribune did something smart: it didn’t just roll out a slogan. It put reporters in front of readers and let them explain what they were seeing, what they were verifying, what they still didn’t know, and what it costs — emotionally and operationally — to cover a story that is still moving.
The campaign line says, “Because the world is watching.”
Fine. But the deeper truth is simpler: when the world is watching, a newsroom can either perform — or it can report.
On Tuesday, the Star Tribune showed more reporting than performing.
And that, in 2026, is the rarest form of credibility there is.
