In this week’s issue: This week at The Objective, three new stories. The national media has a historical disregard of the South, and in turn, the South’s problems are now the nation’s. The need for funding so that journalists appropriately covering political movements can continue to do so. And what the loss of Teen Vogue means for teen media.

Plus, our media round-up features a worker-owned publication’s five-year reflection, striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers’ return to work offer, and generative AI’s infiltration into freelance journalism scams.

—James Salanga

“Nearly a decade into my writing career, as an Atlanta-based journalist, I’ve become accustomed to national media turning a blind eye to the South,” Aja Arnold writes.

“As one of the first journalists to report on Cop City and the Stop Cop City movement, mostly through Atlanta-based outlet Mainline, I spent many hours over the last four years reaching out to bigger outlets, mainstream news reporters, and writing pitch emails, which largely met with silence until the violent police killing of 26-year-old climate activist Tortuguita in January 2023.”

Read the full story.

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Teen Vogue is a major loss for many young (and adult!) readers. But this is just the latest in corporate and mainstream media consolidations and closures for the sake of maximizing profits. The 1996 Telecommunications Act ushered in an era of deregulation and paved the way for mergers and acquisitions. Because of those consolidations, the large majority of for-profit news media are now owned by just six conglomerates.

Lara Witt and Maya Schenwar argue that what we are witnessing today can and should more accurately be described as media capitulating to President Donald Trump’s racist and authoritarian agenda — or at the very least, newsroom leaders finding an opportunity to stop pretending that they ever cared about correcting the systemic wrongs of their industry.

Read the full story.

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Gen Z writers have the short end of the stick with opportunities in journalism. While our millennial predecessors had Vice, Rookie Mag, and Buzzfeed for their wacky stories and long-winded explainers, we had Teen Vogue, Noella Williams, a previous Teen Vogue contributor, writes.

“As many eulogized Teen Vogue on X (formerly Twitter) after news of the magazine’s merger with Vogue.com, the publication carved a space for us to feel recognized and validated, and its loss under rising conservatism creates an irreplaceable void in teen media.”

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.

📝 Defector Media’s reflections on five years in worker-owned media: Jasper Wang, Defector Media’s VP of Revenue and Operations, takes part of the publication’s annual report into a standalone blog, seeing the growth from 2020 to 2025 and the broader worker-owned media landscape.

📰 Hearst eliminates and outsources Dallas Morning News positions, violating contract with union: The Dallas News Guild issued a statement citing that having 26 positions affected is a violation of the collective bargaining agreement.

🖥️ Post-Gazette strikers have sent newspaper return to work offer: “Striking workers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PG) sent their return to work offer to the company on Monday, heralding the end of the longest-running strike in the United States,” NewsGuild reports.

📲 An investigation into a possible scammer highlights more problems as generative AI seeps into journalism: The Local’s editor Nicholas Hune-Brown received a pitch for a story that led him to ask more questions about a writer’s work history — and discovering their work may have been full of generative AI material.

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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