Courtnay Kim, a 20-year veteran of the Star Tribune newsroom, has been named assistant managing editor of business news, taking leadership of coverage of the Minnesota business community digitally and in print.

With 17 reporters and editors, the department is one of the largest business-news operations at a newspaper in the country. Kim is the first woman of color to be appointed to the role at the Star Tribune.

“Courtnay is a thoughtful, aspirational editor who knows our community well and wants to serve it with the best journalism,” said Rene Sanchez, editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune. “We consider business coverage a vital part of our mission and are confident that she and our great team of business editors and reporters will fulfill it.”

Kim will be charged with leading a strategy to enhance digital coverage of the business community while strengthening the newspaper’s core print product. Her appointment comes at a time when the Star Tribune is re-examining the diversity of its coverage.

“We’re asking ourselves, ‘What kind of stories do we want to tell and whose stories do we want to tell?’ ” she said. “We want to broaden how we cover business, which means remaining committed to telling the stories of how our Fortune 500 companies influence our world but also telling the stories of how small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs drive our economy and shape our communities.”

She added, “Business news is about how we live. It’s the banks we rely on, the medical technology that revolutionizes care, the mom-and-pop shops that nurture our neighborhoods. Making our coverage more inclusive is imperative.”

Kim draws this perspective from her own life experience. She was born on Daebu Island, a fishing village off the coast of South Korea, and shared a cramped one-bedroom house with her grandparents, parents, aunt and uncle, and four siblings. After her father, a chestnut farmer, died when she was a young girl, she and her twin sister were taken to an orphanage in South Korea, placed into separate foster homes and adopted together by a Minnesota couple.

Kim has a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota, and landed her first job at the Star Tribune as an intern. She has overseen national and world coverage for much of her career at the Star Tribune, managed the copy desk and edited many of the newspaper’s most ambitious public-service projects. Kim also played key roles in the launch of the Sunday Science and Health section, Saturday Inspired section and the quarterly Star Tribune Magazine.

She also has worked at Newsday in New York and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where she was a national finalist for the Livingston Awards, which recognize the best work by journalists younger than 35, and was recognized for Distinguished Coverage of Diversity.

Kim succeeds Thom Kupper, who became assistant managing editor of news last year.

Jackie Crosby • 612-673-7335

Twitter: @JackieCrosby