Oles in the News: St. Olaf professor assisted in a Pulitzer Prize-winning article
The staff of the Minnesota Star Tribune are the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in the Breaking News Reporting category for their thorough and compassionate coverage on the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in 2025.
To help ensure accuracy in their reporting, the journalists tapped St. Olaf College Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Language and Area Studies Giulia Dossi to translate encoded messages written by the shooter.
“The Star Tribune reached out to me to ask for help translating and decoding the Annunciation shooter’s journal, which was written in phonetic English with Cyrillic script,” said Dossi. “They had run it through some artificial intelligence programs, and I was horrified by the colossal mistakes I spotted in the transcription.”
The article that won the Pulitzer Prize covers the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church, which occurred on the morning of August 27, 2025. The journalists give insight into the background of the person who carried out the attack by detailing the shooter’s childhood and struggles leading up to the months before the attack, which resulted in numerous fatalities and injuries. Annunciation parents and families are currently advocating for a gun control bill in the Minnesota House and Senate.
Dossi says it was a privilege to contribute to the Star Tribune’s reporting. “While emotionally taxing, I am honored to have been the human intelligence that was able to help produce timely and accurate reporting,” she says. “As we tell our students: the skills you are learning at St. Olaf are not replicable by a machine!”
This collaboration between journalists and a professor demonstrates the civic relationship between academia and news outlets. Read the original Star Tribune article.