It’s been a brutal week watching hundreds of journalists lose their jobs. Thinking of everyone impacted by the cuts happening across newsrooms, and those in Minnesota still reporting under duress.

Uplifting a few things — members of the Post Guild, the newspaper’s union, have started two funds for impacted colleagues: one for Guild-represented colleagues and one for workers ineligible for Guild representation, including international correspondents, translators, and researchers. And there’s a new rapid response fund for journalists covering ICE activity in Minnesota, launched earlier this week.

Our stories in this week’s issue: The Washington Post steps further back from 2020 commitments, how national and local news media shirked substantive coverage of anti-trans legislation in 2025, and disaster reporters reflect on covering the long tail of Helene’s devastation in Appalachia.

Plus, newsrooms condemn arrest of independent Black journalists, a nonprofit pledges to support Black media infrastructure, ProPublica Guild readies a strike, student journalism uncovers Epstein ties with department leadership, and more.

—James Salanga

In 2020, Fred Ryan — then-publisher and CEO of the Washington Post —announced several new positions intended to “use our powerful platform to address issues of race in this historic moment and over the long-term.”

On Wednesday, the Post’s now-former race and ethnicity reporter, Emmanuel Felton, said he, the other reporter on his team covering race, and the editor of race coverage on the Post’s national desk were among the over 300 staffers who lost their jobs in sweeping layoffs.

That means, Felton said in a post on X, “the team covering America beyond D.C. is now 90% white.”

Read more.

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The failures of newsrooms to substantively cover anti-trans legislation in 2023 and 2024 have compounded over the first year of Trump's second term in office. 

Aleksandra Vaca, who writes Transitics, a newsletter focused on dissecting legislation and politics affecting the trans community, argues that this past year has highlighted how the news media’s failure to protect trans Americans hasn’t just been about how it covers trans people — it’s been about how it doesn't cover attacks on their humanity.

"We, as journalists, always talk about being that tool by which the world can come to learn about what's going on around them and how they can show up in it," Tre’vell Anderson, executive director of the Trans Journalists Association, told Vaca. "It becomes very hard to say that we are fulfilling that role if trans people aren't part of the discourse."

Read more.

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One year after Hurricane Helene, a catastrophic storm which killed hundreds of people and left thousands more wading through infrastructural collapse, journalists descended on Appalachia for commemorative events and feature stories.

Two reporters at Blue Ridge Public Radio who lived and reported through the initial storm in September 2024 alongside their team reflect on this past year and a half — particularly the impact of disaster journalism that is vital but can also be traumatizing for both journalists and sources. 

“As reporters, there’s an opportunity to do so much more than highlight misery,” Laura Hackett and Katie Myers write. 

Read more.

🎤 After independent Black journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon were arrested last Friday, media outlets and coalitions, from the Movement Media Alliance (of which The Objective is part) to affinity organizations, Minnesota reporters, and individual newsrooms wholly condemned the action. Capital B also highlighted the history of Black reporters being disproportionately targeted both on and off the job.

🏹 Related: Onyx Impact launched the “Invest in Black Media” campaign after Don Lemon and Georgia Fort’s arrest, pledging $500,000 to Black media organizations. The effort is to help build capacity and ensure the longevity of Black media infrastructure.

🪧 After over two years of negotiating over its first contract, more than 80% of ProPublica Guild members have signed a pledge in favor of a potential strike. The union started an ongoing strike fund in late December.

⚒️ What does being a worker-owner at a journalism cooperative look like? Nieman Lab spoke to worker-owners across six such newsrooms to provide insight into their everyday experience and the promise of the model at a time when funding journalism proves a herculean task.

📉 In addition to the Washington Post cuts, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is eliminating 50 positions. Hechinger Report’s executive editor also announced her layoff.

📄 Pink slime news sites are flooding local public offices with FOIA requests, most notably Metric Media, a right-wing news organization that focuses most FOIA requests on “rigged” elections, banned books, and incarcerated transgender people.

🏫 Student journalists at Boston University broke news about dean’s close ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The dean was editor-in-chief of Scientific American at the time of the meetings, which had invited Epstein to an editorial meeting. New Scientist, Forbes, and National Geographic also appear in dozens of documents released by the DOJ.

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.

This issue is by James Salanga and Marlee Baldridge. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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