The Capital-Star team has done a lot of good work this year. Each of us chose our favorite stories from those that we wrote ourselves and those that our colleagues also wrote.
Kim Lyons
I selected several works that I felt best reflected the reporters’ style and their broader body of work.
I mentioned it often John Cole as “tireless” throughout 2024 as he always found novel ways to cover the news. His knowledge of Philly politics is impressive, and when he pitched a story idea, even when I was skeptical, he was usually on the right track (see: Trump at SneakerCon)
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced the commutation of 1,500 sentences, including one of judges’Children for casha scandal that has affected families in northeastern Pennsylvania. John noted that Gov. Josh Shapiro will speak the next day at an unrelated event in Scranton, Biden’s hometown and part of the Kids for Cash region. Shapiro often takes questions from reporters when he hosts community events, and he was actually asked about Biden’s decision, calling it “totally wrong.”
I was very impressed by the persistent and precise work Ian Karbal on the strike in the Post-Gazette, but others have highlighted this excellent article (see below), so I wanted to direct readers to another of his best articles of the year. He looked at the impact that pharmacy benefit managers have had on Pennsylvania pharmacies – many blame middlemen for driving independent and chain drugstores out of business – and legislative efforts to rein in some of their more problematic practices.
Peter Hall he wrote about a billion articles this year about Pennsylvania absentee ballots and the countless lawsuits challenging them, or so we thought. He also worked with our news partners at PublicSource on one of our best stories of the year, highlighting the plight of people imprisoned for second-degree murder without the possibility of parole – many of whom have never killed anyone (more on that below). But what Pete does best is take complicated legal and legislative topics and guide the reader with context and insight, and that’s exactly what he did with this story about the Allentown Neighborhood Improvement Zone that motivated a showdown with Treasury Secretary Pat Brown and the principal for the state senator who replaced him in the Lehigh Valley.
This year, I covered multiple Senate and presidential campaigns across Pennsylvania and attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. There I met Angie Gialloreto, the oldest congressional delegate and committee member from Wilkins Township. She has attended every convention since 1976 and was a sturdy supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris. “I believe in freedom. I believe in America,” she told me in my favorite story of 2024.
Peter Hall
John Cole he came up with the idea for this story after covering a meeting in which a local official questioned the impact of proposed rail connections from Scranton and the Poconos to New York. Concerns about crime were not widely shared. But with rail pro-Sen. Bob Casey (R-Pa.) now facing a challenge from U.S. Sen.-elect Dave McCormick, who has said he will vote to repeal the bipartisan infrastructure bill funding the project, a longtime goal, restoring passenger rail service to northeastern Pennsylvania has become an election issue.
Ian Karbal noticed something odd about the 100-page bill, which provides instructions to state agencies on how to spend the money the Legislature and governor’s office allocate from the state budget. Ian dived down the rabbit hole and discovered that 11 school districts received additional money on top of the historic fair funding formula distributed in the 2024-2025 budget. His report examined the reasons for the extra money and whether it was a fair solution compared to what Democrats said was a compromise that hampered student exchanges.
The February 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train crash devastated rural communities along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. One year after the cloud of toxic smoke cleared and trains began running on the Norfolk-Southern freight line between Chicago and Pittsburgh, residents and lawmakers continued to work to restore the situation and ensure that safety on the nation’s railways did not take a backseat to profits. . Kim Lyons looked back at the challenges they faced.
Pennsylvania’s richest man spends tens of millions of his own money in a typical election cycle, and the 2024 election was no exception. In this story, I used Federal Communications Commission and advertising industry data to examine how Yass’s PAC was spending money to influence the Pennsylvania attorney general race and attempt to return the House of Representatives to Republican control. Although Republican Dave Sunday won the race for attorney general, the effort was aimed at rural Democrats in the House of Representatives it didn’t pay off.
Ian Karbal
What makes journalism last is not that different from other types of stories: characters that draw us in and ground us.
It’s solid to imagine that anyone reading about Marie “Mecha” Scott or the other people in this story wouldn’t be moved by them. But the details that make Scott stand out on the site can only be found through persistent reporting. Thanks to this extra effort, I still think about Pete Hall’s story, many months after it was published, and the questions it raises about justice, punishment, and guilt.
I have a weakness for a story that becomes more and more complicated the longer you develop it. To be straightforward, when I first wrote a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the second anniversary of the strike, I expected a pretty cut and arid labor story. But the more interviews I did and the more deadlines I missed, the more my assumptions were questioned and the more I realized I was entering what felt like a complicated family drama.
There is also my probably personal interest in reporting on the press itself. I believe that media reporting is best approached in the context of reporting on public services. A newspaper like the Post-Gazette – love it or hate it – is imperative to maintaining an informed citizenry in Pittsburgh. It also deserves the same level of scrutiny and accountability as any other civic institution.
At first glance, it’s a really uncomplicated story: a political candidate made a promise, and a reporter tried to get it down in print. But what John Cole what I love so much here is to examine the subtext of what was actually delivered and delve into the history of similar promises made that were mostly never kept.
Subtext and innuendos can be really uncomfortable for a political reporter, but they are an imperative part of any campaign. People are often more aware of what’s hidden between the lines of a candidate’s message than what’s on a policy page. John does a really good job here of illuminating this in an straightforward way, providing significant context and relevant history.
Sometimes what’s on the edge of a major news cycle is just as significant as what’s in the center of it. In August, when all eyes were on Andrews Joint Air Force Base in Maryland, where a group of prisoners held in Russia had arrived in America, Kim Lyons he looked closer to home. There, Anne Fogel, a Pennsylvania woman whose brother is still held in a Russian prison, wondered why her family had not been so lucky.
While this moment was cause for celebration, this story served as a sober reminder of the people left behind and as a portrait of a moment of complicated grief for the people who waited for them.
John Cole
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is an institution not only in Western Pennsylvania, but has long been widely respected throughout the Commonwealth and the nation. Hard-working Post-Gazette reporters have been on strike for two years, and questions remain about the future of the strike. Ian Karbal has done an excellent job of digging into the details, documenting the events that have unfolded over the past few years and updating readers on the status of the hard-working reporters on strike today.
In 2024, Pennsylvanians have been inundated with all kinds of political ads. The race for the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes may have grabbed the headlines, but downhill races were also key in Pennsylvania. Peter Hall did an excellent job detailing how Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest resident and conservative megadonor, spent his money in the state in 2024.
Pennsylvania workers have been in the spotlight in the 2024 Pennsylvania elections. As experts around the world weighed in on their thinking ahead of the November election, a group of workers at a western Pennsylvania glass plant that was about to close hoped their pleas wouldn’t be ignored. The status of this Charleroi glass factory has become an issue in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania Kim Lyons went to the site and talked to workers about the status of their jobs and what they thought elected officials could do to assist them.
Of the dozens of rallies I covered during the 2024 election, I can confidently say that SneakerCon stood out the most. It was a Friday afternoon in February, and news broke that former President Donald Trump would be in Philadelphia for a sneaker convention. I decided to buy a ticket to the event to cover it, and ended up taking a front-row seat as Trump unveiled his novel gold sneakers to a mixture of cheers and boos.
I’m not sure what effect his Sneaker Con appearance had on the 2024 outcome, but I can say that the event provided a glimpse into how Trump intends to run his 2024 campaign in Pennsylvania and beyond, reaching out to voters using non-traditional campaign methods.
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