ALT Wednesday, January 7, 2026 Post-Gazette to Publish Final Edition and Cease Operations May 3, 2026 Block Communications, Inc. and the Block family are saddened to announce that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette plans to publish its final edition and cease operations on May 3, 2026. Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette. Despite those efforts, the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable. Recent court decisions would require the Post-Gazette to operate under a 2014 labor contract that imposes on the Post-Gazette outdated and inflexible operational practices unsuited for today’s local journalism. We deeply regret the impact this decision will have on Pittsburgh and the surrounding region. The Block family is proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century and will exit with their dignity intact.

ALT a stick drawing of a cat with an outstretched hand with the objective's logo on top with the words lets reimagine journalism together surrounding it

ALT a promo photo for a panel at aaja seattle 2025: forging our legacies, navigating the future. the panel is called “Covering LGBTQ+ and Trans Policies: Accountability journalism and LGBTQ+ rights” and is part of the community track at aaja. there are headshots of moderator elise takahama (east asian woman with her black hair in a ponytail), panelists anita kumar (southeast asian woman with her black hair down), james salanga (filipino person with shoulder length red hair) and bobby caina calvan (filipino man with close cropped black hair).

ALT a promo photo for a panel at asian american journalists association at 9 am, saturday, august 2nd, 2025 located at the redwood. the panel is called “Identifying Anti-Trans and Anti-Queer Bias: A conversation led by rising queer and trans journalists working in public media, fact-checking, local, state, and national coverage” and is part of the community track at aaja. there are headshots of moderator jireh deng (east asian person with their black-brown hair in a floppy haircut), panelists rae deng (east asian person with red hair, glasses, and curtain bangs), shaanth nanguneri (south asian person with shoulder length curly dark brown hair) and hannah chinn (east asian person with close cropped black hair).

ALT [Sebastian] Margaret: One of the other ones is not being duped into believing that an advocate — somebody (usually able-bodied) who works in disability service provision, somebody who’s an able-bodied parent, a guardian, a close friend, a partner, a sibling of a disabled person — that they are a suitable person to speak about the experiences of their familial relation, their students, their clients, or disabled communities. That [advocate] is not the right person. And too often, in regard to disabled life experience, our lived experience therefore politics, analysis, culture, history, and resistance — more than for any other identity group, it is still acceptable to believe somebody who doesn’t live with personal experience of the oppression is a viable proxy for the people who do. That this happens with frequency in of itself reflects the deep ways ableism prohibits the recognition of our competency and innate credibility.

ALT And to what Ericka said: We are the narrators of our lived experience and our politics. No one else can do that for us. No one else should be asked to do that for us. And if you are asking somebody else believing they are a credible person, then it’s time to pause right there. Because they’re not. I would also add, and I believe it’s in the guide: Collaborate with disabled journalists, because they too exist and have been working hard and accountably to shift narratives from inside the journalism world for a long time. Explore how you can amplify their work. You’re in a field of expertise and have a platform and privilege to leverage to corrode practices and traditions that are likely biased in multiple ways against disabled journalists.

ALT [Ericka A.] Dixon: Yeah, I echo all of that. And I think one thing to add is, I would want people to get curious about eugenics and really start doing that self-learning around the history, how it’s evolved to be in our present. Especially during this political time that we’re in, really start interrogating — ”How can this policy … be used to eliminate, dispose of, warehouse certain types of people?” Start being able to name eugenics. In our current political moment with everything that’s going on, I think [that] is really critical.

ALT In their April 29, 2024 issue, The Mercury’s previous editorial board published their goodbyes to the paper and to the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). In their final issue, the outgoing managing editor said they were “excited to see what The Mercury does in the future.” Five months later, no students were left working at the 44-year-old paper after a tense relationship between students and their own advisor and university administration culminated in a strike followed by the paper’s dissolution. The Mercury exemplifies what happens when school administrators exploit internal conflicts to shut down student press and how students are capable of striking out on their own and shaping their coverage according to their communities’ needs.

ALT Shortly after the strike, Gutierrez and the former staff of The Mercury started The Retrograde, a newly independent student newspaper no longer affiliated with UT-Dallas Student Media. They’re in the process of incorporating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with the goal of continuing coverage under a new banner. It currently has a board of directors consisting of local journalist Steven Monacelli, freelance journalist Michael Koretzky, and UT-Dallas assistant professor of philosophy Dr. Humberto González-Núñez.

ALT As Mahadevan explains, in the heyday of content mills between 2012 to 2017 or 2018, reporters fishing for stories to meet the output demands of the job often relied on Twitter to find quick takes that could be written off as indicators of a larger discourse. One or two tweets from random users would form the basis of an entire article purely because quantity took precedent over quality. But even as content mills died out, tweet-based trend pieces prevailed. Except rather than reporting on an obvious monoculture, they merely validate the functionality of social media algorithms to regurgitate similar material over and over until one person’s individualized feed feels like a litmus test for the next big thing.

ALT “This data belongs to all of us,” said Nsikan Akpan, the managing editor for Think Global Health. “We’ve already paid for this data, so taking it away, in some way, is robbing people of the information that they pay for in order to be informed and also to live.” The erasure of data on trans and gender-diverse people reflects the Trump administration’s anti-trans party line. And while the data may be restored, their current loss and any likely revision impacts journalists, and more importantly, the communities they serve, across their beats. “All these things could be back up online next week,” Akpan said. “But … a lot of them are being scrubbed of essential information and essential details. The people that are associated with these labels that they’re scrubbing still exist.”

ALT The move to strip trans and gender-diverse people from the nation’s public health and science data — along with minimizing other marginalized groups — also relies on exclusionary and harmful legacy media coverage. In the past, coverage from legacy media like the New York Times has been similarly used to justify anti-trans legislation, which has been growing year over year. “The trans community is part of who we are,” Blum said. “This administration is tending to pick off what they see as the most vulnerable, least powerful groups, so you start there [with data revision], but that doesn’t mean you stop there … You can sit around and say, ‘Well, that’s not my problem, but it is your problem.’”

ALT Petrin added that the data overhaul opens up questions about accountability journalism looking at data privacy, given the administration’s explicit anti-trans stance: “We collected a lot of information, and how is it now going to be used?” And now more than ever, Petrin said, it’s crucial for cis journalists to invest time and energy into learning how to report on trans communities accurately. “Often, if there is a trans reporter in a traditional newsroom, they’re the only person on their beat in that newsroom, if not the only person who is openly trans, you know, in, in that entire workplace,” they said. “And so a lot gets put on them, especially in times like this where everything that we are reporting on is so personally upsetting.”

ALT Poster of a Palestinian photojournalist wearing a press vest and red keffiyeh holding up a camera, with a single tear falling from his eye. Text above him reads "No Room for Neutrality," and a black border is designed like a keffiyeh.

ALT Journalism has a historical precedent of celebrating reporters who were once ostracized for wielding their platforms for justice. Ida B. Wells is now heralded for taking a stance against lynching, Christianne Amanpour was once criticized for using the word “genocide” to describe a mass killing of Muslim Bosniack men in Srebrenica and is now CNN’s chief international anchor of her own global affairs program. Both are strong examples of the impact journalism could have when journalists center morality over “objectivity”. Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of the Elements of Journalism, a fundamental text in journalism education, summarized: “The method is objective, but the journalist is not.”

ALT Originally popularized by Walter Lippman, the concept began appearing in the industry around the 1920’s, during the time Sigmund Freud was developing his theories of the unconscious. But Lippman’s objectivity made no claims to individual neutrality. “Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work,” writes Rosenstiel. Yet journalists at mainstream newsrooms have failed even at this standard.

ALT An analysis from The Intercept showed major outlets like the New York Times favored Israel, using more descriptive and humanizing language than when they covered Palestinian deaths. CNN’s protocol for covering Israel and Palestine was also called into question by staffers who say all coverage regarding Israel and Palestine was first routed to their bureau in Jerusalem, according to an audio file of a meeting obtained by The Intercept. Some of the most powerful people in news media also have a track record of supporting Israel. Media magnate Rupert Murdoch has supported Israel over the years, calling pushback against Israeli occupation a “soft war” to delegitimize the state. Jeffery Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, has also volunteered as a prison guard for the Israel Defense Force during the First Intifada at Ketziot prison camp, which was condemned by human rights groups such as Amnesty International for violating the Geneva Conventions.

ALT To further complicate coverage, antisemitic incidents aren’t accurately tracked. While the Anti-Defamation League reports that antisemitic incidents rose 361% from the previous year, Jewish news outlet The Forward was the first to report one big problem with the numbers: They include nonviolent rallies in support for Palestine into its count. Outlets such as CNN, NBC, and Axios picked up the report without checking the data behind the claim, further blurring the lines differentiating antisemitism and Zionism.

ALT A heap of the new stickers for The Objective. The stickers all show objectivejournalism.org. The most prominent one reads Objectivity Doesn't Mean Neutrality; another reads "Writing for," in a speech bubble overlapped by a speech bubble that says "Not about." The other sticker type is a fill-in-the-blank sticker that reads "Objectivity Is ______".

ALT What was your first byline? My first byline — at least, the first I can remember in print — was at the Tracy Press, my hometown local paper. I wrote about “paper programming” happening at the local library. Getting to do a short volunteer stint at the Press endeared me to local news and helped me shake off the perceptions of Tracy, and the California Central Valley, as what many referred to as a “cow town.”

ALT What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism? Find community in journalism. That’s been the most life-giving thing for me, because this field can be really tough emotionally, financially, and sometimes physically. It’s really just making friends with other people who have the same or similar values around what matters in their coverage and what kind of journalist they’d like to be. Also, if you hold an identity (or multiple) that has been underrepresented in journalism, I’d also recommend joining the affinity groups that relate to your identity, which can also provide camaraderie if you’re not in a newsroom! (For freelancers, I’d suggest joining the Freelance Journalists Union and/or National Writers Union, too.)

ALT james is wearing a makeshift white party hat. they have painted their face with white, drawn black triangles around their eyes, red lipstick, and a line for their eyebrows. they’re wearing a black dress with puffy sleeves and a chainmail jester necklace with red beads and spiral charms. their earrings are made of chainmail triangles

ALT james standing in their full costume in their apartment hallway. their black dress has three big primary colored buttons in the middle