Kim Hyatt of the Minnesota Star Tribune won the 2025 Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) award for Best Beat reporting. It’s the latest in a series of awards for Hyatt since she graduated in 2014 from the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), including the 2015 Minnesota Newspaper Association Dave Pyle New Journalist Award.

As a Journalism student at UMD, Hyatt worked for the student-run Lake Voice community blog and for the UMD Statesman (now the Bark) as a reporter for three years. She began her career at the Owatonna People’s Press, moving to the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. She currently works for the Minnesota Star Tribune. She started there in 2019, covering the suburbs of the Twin Cities and later Hennepin County courts, but in 2024, everything changed. 

Hyatt returned to rural Minnesota to become the north central reporter for the Star Tribune. “I grew up in a town that many have not heard of,” Hyatt says. “Laporte, where the population sign reads 111, where the graduation class size never exceeds 30, and where I thought I would never live again.”

Hyatt came home, and she came home as the region’s storyteller. 

According to the judges in the SPJ competition, she does more than report. Hyatt “has given readers unique, meaningful stories that break the beat-reporting mold.” The judges said that “Hyatt has a rare gift for mining powerful stories in small towns and making them relevant to readers all across the state.”

At a time when the urban-rural divide in Minnesota is deeper and the differences starker than ever before, Hyatt’s efforts are incredibly important. According to Hyatt, “it felt like a win for the region that SPJ recognized this coverage area that wasn’t a beat before I moved back home.” Hyatt’s stories make north central Minnesota visible in ways that it’s never been seen before.

Hyatt’s coverage includes slices of life, government affairs, public safety, and Indigenous communities across northern Minnesota. 

Her former teachers in Journalism and Writing Studies have been following her work, and are proud of her many successes. Chris Julin, a journalism professional who taught Hyatt while she was at UMD, celebrated her work when he learned of the award. 

“I have never seen a journalist come out of the starting block faster than Kim,” Julin says, and that tenacity began while she was still a student. “Early in her first semester on campus, she got a story idea during a class discussion on Tuesday. She came to my office to talk about the idea on Wednesday. She'd already done half a dozen interviews, including a state senator and a bar owner downtown. And she hasn't slowed down since.”

Hyatt says she fell into journalism at UMD as a sophomore transfer art student and instantly found a home in the Humanities Building with outstanding professors like Julin and John Hatcher. “They are the foundation of my decade-long journalism career,” she says. “I’m so lucky I landed in their classrooms that felt more like newsrooms, full of ideas and excitement that fueled the storyteller in me.” She urges budding journalists, photographers, and writers of all types to freelance for the student paper and explore Duluth with intense curiosity. “Be relentless in pursuit of a good story,” she says.

It’s that impulse that always impressed David Beard, one of her professors in Writing Studies. “While Kim was sharply developing an identity and a skill set as a journalist, I always thought of her as a writer, a storyteller, and I am ecstatic to see her telling new and important stories,” says Beard.

This fall, Hyatt will be attending a month-long writer’s residency in France after earning a grant to Chateau d’Orquevaux, an acclaimed international artists and writers residency. Kim has a suggestion for other journalists and writers: “Apply! You might surprise yourself.”

Read more about Kim in her Star Tribune profile.

Header and footer images: Kim Hyatt, an alum of the University of Minnesota Duluth and now with the Minnesota Star Tribune, won the 2025 Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists award for Best Beat reporting. She visited campus in September 2025 for the UMD Journalism Program Media Expo. Hosted by UMD journalism faculty, the Expo is designed to connect UMD students with alumni and local professionals.