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The Capital-Star team did a lot of good work this year. We each picked our favorite stories, from among the ones we wrote and the ones our colleagues wrote as well.
Kim Lyons
I picked a few pieces that I thought best represented the reporters’ styles as well as their larger body of work.
I frequently referred to John Cole as “tireless” throughout 2024, because he was always finding new angles to report on news. His knowledge of Philadelphia politics is impressive, and when he pitched a story idea, even when I was skeptical, he was usually on to something (See: Trump at SneakerCon)
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced the commutations of 1,500 sentences that included one of the judges in the “Kids for Cash” scandal that affected families in northeastern Pennsylvania. John noticed that Gov. Josh Shapiro would be speaking at an unrelated event the next day in Scranton, Biden’s childhood hometown and part of the region affected by the Kids for Cash scheme. Shapiro often takes questions from reporters when he does community events, and sure enough, he was asked about Biden’s decision, calling it “absolutely wrong.”
I was so impressed with the tenacious, thorough work Ian Karbal did on the story about the Post-Gazette strike, but others highlighted that excellent piece (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 pharmacies in Pennsylvania — many blame the middlemen for driving indie and chain drugstores out of business — and the legislative efforts to rein in some of their more problematic practices.
Peter Hall wrote approximately one billion stories this year about Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots and the myriad lawsuits challenging them or at least it felt that way to us. He also worked with our news partners at PublicSource on one of our finest stories of the year, about the fate of people incarcerated for second-degree murder without parole — many of whom had never killed anyone (see more on that below). But what Pete does best is take complex legal and legislative topics and guide the reader along with context and insight, and that’s what he did in this story about Allentown’s Neighborhood Improvement Zone, which was the motivation behind a showdown with Revenue Secretary Pat Browne and the state senator who replaced him in the Lehigh Valley.
I covered a lot of the Senate and presidential campaigns across Pennsylvania this year, and attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. That’s where I met Angie Gialloreto, the oldest delegate at the convention, a committeewoman from Wilkins Township. She’s attended every convention since 1976, and was rooting hard for 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 had the idea for this story after covering a meeting where a local official questioned the impact of proposed rail service from Scranton and the Poconos to New York. The concern about crime wasn’t widely shared. But with rail booster Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) facing a challenge by now Sen-elect Dave McCormick, who said he’d vote to repeal the bipartisan infrastructure law funding the project, the longstanding goal of returning passenger rail service to northeast Pennsylvania became an election issue.
Ian Karbal spotted something odd buried in the 100-page bill that gives state agencies instructions on how to spend the money the legislature and governor’s office allocates in the state budget. Ian’s dive down the rabbit hole revealed 11 school districts that got additional money on top of the historic fair funding formula money distributed in the 2024-2025 budget. His reporting examined the reasons for the extra money and whether it was a fair solution to what Democrats said was a compromise that short-changed students.
The East Palestine, Ohio, rail disaster in February 2023 devastated rural communities along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. A year after the toxic smoke cloud disappeared and trains began running between Chicago and Pittsburgh on Norfolk-Southern’s freight line, residents and lawmakers were still working on the recovery and making sure safety on the nation’s railways doesn’t take a backseat to profit. 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. For this story, I used Federal Communications Commission records and advertising industry data to look at how Yass’ PAC was spending money to influence the race for Pennsylvania attorney general and to attempt to flip the state House back to Republican control. While Republican Dave Sunday won the attorney general race, the effort to target rural Democrats in the House didn’t pay off.
Ian Karbal
What gives a piece of journalism staying power isn’t all that different from any other kind of story: characters that pull us in and ground us.
It’s hard to imagine anyone reading about Marie “Mechie” Scott, or some of the other people who populate this story, and not being moved by them. But the details that make Scott stand out on a page can only be found through tenacious reporting. That extra effort is why I’m still thinking about this Pete Hall story months after it was published, and the questions about justice, punishment and culpability that it raises.
I’m a sucker for a story that grows more and more complex the longer you spend unfolding it. To be frank, I expected a pretty cut and dry labor story when I first pitched an article marking the two-year anniversary of the strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But the more interviews I did and deadlines I blew past, the more my assumptions were challenged, and the more I realized I was wading into what resembled a complex family drama.
There’s also my arguably self-involved interest in reporting on the press itself. I believe media reporting is best approached as a matter of covering a public service. A newspaper like the Post-Gazette—love it or hate it—is essential to maintaining an informed citizenry in Pittsburgh. And it deserves the same level of scrutiny and accountability as any other civic institution.
On its face, this is a really simple story: a political candidate made a promise and a reporter sought to record it in print. But what John Cole did here that I love so much is interrogate the subtext of what was really being communicated and dive into the history of similar promises made and, for the most part, never kept.
Subtext and innuendo can be really uncomfortable territories for a political reporter, but they are an essential part of any campaign. People are often more clued in to what’s between the lines of a candidate’s message than whatever is on their policy page. And John does a really good job here of illuminating that in a way that’s fair, provides important context and relevant history to boot.
Sometimes what’s on the edge of a major news cycle is just as important as what’s at the center. In August, when all eyes seemed to turn to the Joint Andrews Air Base in Maryland, where a group of prisoners who’d been held in Russia reached America, Kim Lyons looked closer to home. There, Anne Fogel, a Pennsylvania resident whose brother was still being held in a Russian prison, was left to wonder why her family hadn’t been so lucky.
While the moment was a cause for celebration, this story served as a sober reminder of the people left behind, and as a portrait of a moment of complex grief for the people waiting for them.
John Cole
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is not only an institution in western Pennsylvania, but has been widely respected across the commonwealth and the country for centuries. The hard-working reporters at the Post-Gazette have been on strike for two years and questions remain about the strike’s future. Ian Karbal did an excellent deep-dive, documenting the events that have taken place over the past few years and letting readers know what the status is today for those hard-working reporters on strike.
Pennsylvanians were inundated with political advertisements of all kinds in 2024. The race for the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes may have garnered the most headlines, but down ballot races were also key in Pennsylvania. Peter Hall did an outstanding job detailing how Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s wealthiest resident and conservative mega donor, was spending his money in the state in 2024.
Pennsylvania workers were very much at the center of the 2024 election in Pennsylvania. With pundits from across the globe wondering how they were thinking leading into November’s election, a group of workers at a glass plant in western Pennsylvania slated to be closed were hoping their pleas would not be ignored. The status of this glass plant in Charleroi emerged as a topic in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race and Kim Lyons went on the ground and talked to workers about the status of their jobs and what they thought elected officials could do to help them.
Of the dozens of rallies I covered during the 2024 election, I can safely say that the one that stood out the most was SneakerCon. It was a Friday afternoon in February and news broke that former President Donald Trump would be making an appearance in Philadelphia at a sneaker convention. I decided to buy a ticket to the event to cover it, and ended up with a front-row seat, as Trump unveiled his new gold sneakers to a mix of cheers and booing.
I’m not sure what impact, if any, his appearance at Sneaker Con had on the 2024 result, but can say this event gave a bit of a sneak peek into how Trump was going to run his 2024 campaign in Pennsylvania and beyond, reaching out to voters through non-traditional methods of campaigning.
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