In this week’s issue: This week at The Objective, two new stories. Baltimore’s media coverage of an overdose crisis may be contributing to more stigma and crackdowns. And a court decision means that NewsGuild’s longest strike could be over.

Plus, our media round-up features the short-lived period of “reckoning” in digital media, a new global magazine that hopes to eschew Western-centered perspectives, and a multimillion-dollar payout for a newspaper raid.

—James Salanga

When a mass overdose event hospitalized nearly 30 in Baltimore’s Penn North in July, reporters descended upon the low-income Black community. Vctims were photographed on gurneys while harm reduction workers and paramedics scrambled to save lives.

The resulting local coverage contained misinformation and fearmongering at the expense of vulnerable Baltimoreans, echoing journalists’ longstanding failure to responsibly cover those who use drugs.

Read the full story.

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The longest ongoing strike in the U.S. — and the longest in the NewsGuild’s 92-year history — could be coming to an end. Twenty-six workers represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, who have been on strike for over three years, learned Monday that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in their favor against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“If you try to take up arms against a bunch of journalists, you are going to have a bad time, because we are smart, we are creative, and we are relentless,” Post-Gazette education reporter Andrew Goldstein, who has been at the paper since 2014, told The Objective.

Read the full story.

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In a new collaboration between The Objective and News Futures, 14 practitioners share their perspectives on building local, participatory, and durable information systems for the next decade.

💻 There was a time when the internet found empathy, then lost it: Adam Mahoney writes about the summer of 2020 and the short lived period of “reckoning” digital media had for Talking Points Memo.

🌐 A new global magazine hopes to move past Western-centric perspectives: “For many people of my generation, who came of age as writers around the time immediately before and after 9/11, there was already a sense that perspectives were being excluded, positions and viewpoints being marginalized, in the prestige Western press,” Equator co-founder and novelist Mohsin Hamid told the Columbia Journalism Review.

📰 Marion County (Kan.) agrees to pay millions after newspaper raid: The Kansas Reflector reports, “Marion County’s board of commissioners approved agreements Monday with Eric Meyer, the owner and editor of the Marion County Record, and Ruth Herbel, the Marion city councilor whose home was raided in tandem with the newspaper office, and two other journalists.”

📝 A call for writers to boycott the New York Times for its complicity in genocide in Gaza: The paper of record is also the paper that’s had the biggest role in enabling the genocide, writes Writers Against the War on Gaza. As writers, they say in Mondoweiss, we must also hold the paper accountable by severing ties.

🏫 Student journalists face an increase in censorship: On university campuses, student journalists have to fight their school’s administration in order to have the right to report on their schools, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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