After a federal immigration agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with grisly videos quickly going viral on social media, news organizations from around the state, country and world dispatched correspondents and anchors to the scene.
In the days since, that media presence has ebbed and flowed – though a well-resourced local news corps and many national journalists have remained, including reporters for the Guardian, covering additional clashes between police and protesters.
Another shooting (of a man attempting to flee arrest, the government said) on Wednesday drew more coverage, and on Thursday a CNN crew was hit with projectiles while covering a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
While cuts and closures have thinned out local news reporting around the country, the Minneapolis media market remains strong, ensuring the shooting – and what has followed – have received robust coverage.
“I think we have the strongest media ecosystem of any city that’s parallel to our city,” said Matt Carlson, a Minneapolis-based professor of journalism for the University of Minnesota, mentioning the Star Tribune newspaper, Minnesota Public Radio, and smaller outlets such as the Sahan Journal, which covers immigrant communities, including the Somali refugee population that has come under attack from conservatives. (There’s also Alpha News, a conservative outlet that made headlines by publishing cell phone video taken by the ICE officer who killed Good.)
While there are always debates about national and international journalists parachuting-in to cover catastrophes, “I think people in Minneapolis are actually excited to see national coverage of this, because we know that we can’t stop what’s happening by ourselves”, Carlson said.
He also predicted that Minneapolis will remain an epicenter of ICE activity and counter-protests, with Donald Trump recently threatening to invoke the Insurrection Action and send troops to the city.
“I would be very happy if the national news were able to leave because things have died down,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is not a case where things are dying down.”
Here are some of the journalists and newsroom leaders who have participated in coverage.
Omar Jimenez, anchor and correspondent, CNN
Jimenez, 32, came to the story last week with a lot of experience reporting in Minneapolis.
In May 2020, Jimenez was arrested live on CNN while covering protests in the city following the murder of George Floyd, which occurred just blocks away from where Good was killed.
While Jimenez’s team was quickly released, the incident made international headlines as an extraordinary incursion into the activities of journalists.
Since then, Jimenez has returned to the city multiple times for reporting trips. He said his antenna is always up for stories involving Minneapolis. So he flew to Minnesota a few hours after the shooting, arriving on the evening of 7 January and driving straight from the airport to the spot where Good was shot.
“When it became clear that obviously this was going to be as big as it has become, that’s when a manager of mine kind of walked in and said, ‘Hey, are you able to go to Minnesota as soon as possible?’” (He was only delayed, he said, because he needed to go home and get warmer clothes after seeing the weather forecast in Minnesota.)
During his reporting in Minneapolis last week, Jimenez said he met several people that he first encountered back in 2020.
“It’s a little bit of a balance in the sense that you obviously don’t want to be the story,” he said. “But I do think what you want is to try and be able to convey an authentic space, especially when you have the luxury of a camera. Even though everyone is seeing what you’re seeing, they’re not feeling it. There is a little bit of a barrier still. And so that’s why it is a constant balance of: ‘how close do we want to get?’”
Jimenez got pretty close to the action on 8 Januarywhen CNN viewers watched him and his crew running away from law enforcement agents who had moved aggressively toward protesters after someone threw a water bottle at them.
While Jimenez is now back in New York City, he said: “I am not done with this story. I can tell you that.”
Kathleen Hennessey, editor and senior vice-president, Minnesota Star Tribune
A veteran of the Associated Press and the New York Times, Hennessey only took on the top editorial position at the newspaper (which was previously called the Minneapolis Star Tribune) last May. It’s fair to say that she’s been busy, considering the number of major stories that have happened in the state since then, including the June 2025 assassination of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband.
“It’s been maybe busier, newsier than I expected to some degree, but it’s also been really rewarding to be at a place that feels so needed,” she said.
Hennessey’s newsroom of about 200 people has broken several major stories since the shooting, including being the first outlet to report the ICE officer’s name. That story drew a sharp rebuke from DHS press secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who called the outlet “reckless” and said it should “delete their story immediately” (they didn’t).
Hennessey said the decision to name the shooter (Jonathan Ross) was “a very deliberate, much-discussed decision” – but she added that it “wasn’t a particularly tough call”.
She said her news team had been “on edge and prepared and ready” for the Good story, considering the surge of deportation enforcement in recent weeks in the community.
“By this time, we feel pretty well practiced in sort of the quick mobilization of an all-hands-on-deck moment,” she said. “And so this was another one of those, really. Just about everybody immediately ran to their stations and did what they do.”
Considering how widely covered this story has been, “I encourage our newsroom to remember that nobody knows this place better than we do,” she said, “and nobody can be as close to the people involved, and be a more reliable source for people who actually live here.”
Unsurprisingly, Hennessey said the Star Tribune’s website has received a very large number of online readers over the last week and a half – though it’s a bit harder to net paying subscribers.
Going forward, she said she expects her newsroom to remain in overdrive covering the story. “It’s ongoing, it’s unfolding, and it feels very everywhere all at once,” she said. “At any given moment, there’s just a million videos popping up everywhere of incidents and encounters with ICE that feel newsworthy.”
Alex Tabet, political reporter, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC)
Tabet, who arrived in Minnesota at 1am on 7 January, made it to the scene of the shooting extremely quickly. He had already been tipped off by an ICE observer that there was an enforcement action going on in the neighborhood, and then got word that someone had been shot. It was his third reporting trip to Minnesota over the past month. “We were the first – at least – TV crew on the ground,” he said.
Tabet’s first call was to his network’s editorial leaders and standards officials, telling them, “Hey, this is what we know, this is what we don’t know”, he said. “And we started vetting all of the information that we had to try to figure out what is appropriate to put on air, what should we hold off on, basically making sure we had hit the threshold of understanding what was going on.”
Tabet, who left Minnesota on Tuesday after almost a full week, said he’s “hoping to go back as soon as possible” – though he said the network is well staffed on the story. The decision to leave “was a discussion between my bosses and I, because there’s only so many days [you can go] without sleep”.
“I know MS NOW is committed to having a strong presence on the ground, because they recognize how important of a story this is right now,” he said.
Megan Burks, deputy managing producer, MPR News (Minnesota Public Radio)
Burks, who coordinates daily news coverage for the NPR member station, said the newsroom had been settling into a new rhythm since the 7 January killing of Good. And then on Wednesday, a federal officer shot a man in the leg, leading to new protests and clashes with law enforcement.
“Just as it felt like we were settling into a manageable rhythm, this new twist came and now we’re back to trying to figure out what is our new normal, what is our new rhythm,” she said.
Burks said that MPR journalists have focused less on competition with other outlets and more on answering the questions of viewers.
“Knowing that we can’t focus on everything, we’re trying to let the audience drive some of what we choose to put our stamp on,” she said.
Nicole Sganga, homeland security correspondent, CBS News
Sganga arrived in Minneapolis two days before the shooting. She participated in a ride-along with immigration agents and interviewed Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, pressing her on how she can “justify” the government sending 2,000 DHS agents to the city.
In addition to reporting on the ground about Good’s killing, Sganga covered the intensification of immigration raids after the incident.
“My approach is always, ‘get there, bear witness, ask questions,’” Sganga said.
She said it’s been important to cover the story from Minneapolis to be able to press government officials on “contradictory accounts” of what happened and what is happening.
“That kind of independent reporting and verification is critical to holding power to account and to clarifying the facts for the public,” said Sganga, who has reported for the network for a decade.
