While documenting local political turmoil in postindustrial Pennsylvania, a small town mayor vanished for nearly two years, leaving his council and town to drift. After his return—firing city officials left and right, passing motions behind closed doors and keeping truth locked away—Monessen clawed for a voice. Media law pros jumped into the fray, lending their weight to a lost place, and this coverage helped push the lawsuit that finally brought justice.
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In a family of seven, all tangled in the grip of kidney failure and fighting the slow crawl of disease, one sister remains untouched. She left Pennsylvania in 1973, like she knew what was coming. The matriarch blames the air, the water, the slow poison of the postindustrial South. She's convinced it’s a heavy sky or a tainted river running through her veins while she awaits her transplant.
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A former reality TV star took me on a tour of her wild farm, schooling me on her birds and bees. She's deep in honey-making and the commercial business of bee-breeding. Winters have been biting harder each year and she’s started shipping her bees down South to labor through the cold. Despite the pivot, the beekeeper hesitates to name climate change as the beast.
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Pre-COVID, an alarming number of small-town Pennsylvania residents chose to avoid vaccination for their children enrolled in public school, raising concern from medical experts and lawmakers who feared the un-vaxxed number was on track to surpass the 5% variant threshold. Interviews with anti-vaxxing moms gave insight into the medical and philosophical influences for abstaining.
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Crew from The Globe and media partners U-View and WPPJ hit the road for D.C., chasing Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president. From protests in the streets to rallies thick with voices, we captured print, photos, video, and audio, documenting the journey from Pittsburgh to D.C. It’s all there in a roar of history told through every lens we had.
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