Thanks so much to Carmen Gentile of Postindustrial for having me (and my clucking infant) for a conversation on long term storytelling in photojournalism, transitioning from stills to video, Pittsburgh, and other things I like to nerd out on. Photo of one of my favorite Steel City corners above, and podcast link below: https://postindustrial.com/stories/documenting-people-and-culture-in-postindustrial-communities/

I still can’t find the words to express the whirlwind of feelings after hearing that Coverings, our investigation of child sexual abuse and cover-ups in the insular Amish and Mennonite communities, was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s my sincere hope that the survivors who took a risk in sharing their most vulnerable stories with us in hopes of building safer, more healing communities for new generations feel their voices amplified in this moment. We hear change is happening for the better, and I couldn’t think of a better honor than that.

Reporting like this is not born in a vacuum, it’s mopped from the brows of a team of people who believe in the hard work of stories that are hard to report. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to learn from Peter Smith and Shelly Bradbury, whose humble excellence in the craft of reporting carries beyond the page and into the sinews of who they are. Editors Rebecca Droke and Lillian Thomas understood the importance of time, patience, and gentle guidance as we continued to bring back new pieces of a complex puzzle to connect together. My fellow photo staff picked up other assignments so I could be on the road or editing. Designers Zack Tanner and Alex Miller built impactful, clean presentations from the pile of text, video, and photos we’d built throughout the months.

Even further behind-the-scenes are each of our at-home support systems. My family supported me from afar with love and patience I can’t possibly deserve (even while worrying about me and probably not understanding entirely what I was doing). My partner Justin Merriman never questioned the importance of spending time away to work on this, even through my all-nighters of video editing I pulled on our long-awaited vacation at the beach. He gets why it’s important on a broader level, and I can’t imagine this past year without his loyalty and understanding. A tip of my hat to the motel vending machines I frequented as I backed up and organized files after long days of interviews. And to my grandad, a newspaper man through and through, who always told me I would see my name on the Pulitzer list (and who I always thought was just being a sweet grandad by saying that)– I hope you can see this wherever you are.

Thanks to @buzzfeed​ for including our latest story in the “Growing Up Through the Cracks” series on child poverty as part of their “8 Photo Stories That Will Challenge Your View Of The World” list.

The Brown family lives in rural Saltlick, Pa., where 2/3 of children are living in poverty. As milk prices continue to dip and Mary Beth Brown struggles with the physical, emotional, and financial pain of Stage 4 breast cancer, the Browns fear they will be the first generation in their family in 200 years to lose the dairy farm they feel call home.

In the rural area, government services are hard to access. The local officials don’t see social services as their job, while federal and state benefits are funneled through the county seat in Uniontown, a 40-minute drive with no transit options, writes reporter Chris Huffaker.

For the Brown children, a strong social network, centered on their family and their church, has shielded them.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
“They go fishing, they shoot bows and arrows,“ Ms. Brown said. "They don’t know they’re poor.” Read more and see more photos at the Post-Gazette here.

What a rugged emotional landscape this past year was, inside and outside the newsroom walls. Our newsroom receiving the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting feels confusing, an oscillation between wanting to laugh and cry (and barf?). Recognitions like this don’t take way the pain behind what happened, but hopefully honor it, and acknowledge what we can do together pushing in the same direction. “We are not so much celebrating as affirming … the job we were put on this earth to do,” said David Shribman, our former executive editor. “Let’s dedicate ourselves to the memory of those whose lives were lost.” And now, back to work.

Thanks to the PA NewsMedia Association for recognizing Keeley and the Vial and our ongoing series about raising children in the modern overdose crisis in their photo story and series categories. I know I’m lucky to work for a paper that believes in investing the time it takes to do these deep dives (and that allows me to work with investigative reporter Rich Lord), and I hold dear the trust given to us by the Ashbaughs and others who let me in to try to show a bit of their lives.

Since this published, TJ and Kate’s four little girls welcomed a baby brother named in honor of their late Uncle Ricky, whose fatal overdose shook the branches of their family tree. TJ lives knowing that could have been his fate, as well. As he raises his children in recovery, he makes no secret of the disease that killed his brother and turned his ex into a missing person, and has taught his youngest daughter to give a goodnight kiss to the vial of his brother’s ashes he keeps around his neck. Head to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interactive here to see more photos and videos, read the story, and learn more about how T.J. and Kate are working together to acknowledge the generational cycles of addiction in their family and how to best raise their children to be aware of it.

Top photo: Michelle Kenney looks out of the Allegheny County Courthouse window before the start of the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld, charged in the fatal shooting of her son, 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. “As a mom, you can’t prepare for this — you just have to do it — there is no go-to map on this,” Ms. Kenney said. “I’ll treat it as any other role that I have as Antwon’s mother. I just have to do it.”

---

“We will continue to reach out to the community, to call on the community to come together,” said 1Hood activist/musician Jasiri X during a vigil in Rankin to honor Antwon. People gathered on the basketball court in Hawkins Village where Antwon once played, a painting of Antwon’s smiling face looking out above an altar of flowers and candles. Addressing Antwon’s family, Jasiri said, “We will not abandon you in this time… We are with you.”

The words came after a weekend of marches into businesses and through the streets in dark, rain, and shine after the acquittal of former East Pittsburgh Police officer Michael Rosfeld in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Rose. The marches continued through the week, with hundreds of students walking out from school and into the rain to flood the streets of downtown Pittsburgh and chanting the name of Antown Rose II. Third grader Esme carried a painting she made of Antwon that read, “This is why we kneel. #JusticeforAntwon.” Across town at Woodland Hills High School, Antwon’s mother addressed his former high school classmates. “I got up there and said what I would have said to Antwon,” Ms. Kenney said. Don’t walk out of school in protest, she told them. Get an education and work to effect change. Vote. “Do what Antwon isn’t here to do.”

If you have suggestions on stories you want to see from your Western PA community, feel free to contact me to start a conversation.

“It might not happen with one image, it might take thousands of images layered in a consciousness - a national consciousness, and individual consciousness - to really move people forward, move people to action, but I do believe images have that power.” -Lynn Johnson says it best.

Join me at Robert Morris University, let’s talk photojournalism and storytelling!

Bella holds still as her mother dresses her for her first time as Atabey in a Taino Full Moon Ceremony in their neighborhood of Hazelwood. The ceremony marked the last full moon for the winter season and honors the monthly cycles of the earth, human women, and Atabey, or the cosmic matriarch in the Taino people’s tradition. Miguel Sague, a behike (or shaman) at Caney Indigenous Spiritual Circle, spoke of the way that the full moon pulls on the tide’s of the earth’s blood, or the oceans and water. “Human blood also does the same thing, at least in the body of women,” he said,  "All of us, including men, all benefit by this cycle of fertility.“

Bella’s mother, Dayvanna, held tears in her eyes as she watched her daughter take this right of passage. "I get to witness you and all the studies you’ve done to be able to embrace this moment for yourself.” She thanked the cosmic mother for another month of life and blew prayers in smoke to her ancestors.

I felt the weight of hundreds of years of colonization on my shoulders as I watched this beautiful moment unfold. I know the harsh history of photojournalism, white colonialism, and indigenous people, the conflict and misunderstanding caused by the lens of outsiders, pressing up against the understanding that there I was, in a small living room, witnessing something that this young woman had been anticipating her whole life. My head still swarmed with thoughts of the history of my whiteness crashing up against this beautiful, breathtaking, quiet acknowledgement of the infinite and divine, womanhood and moonhood, of a repeating line of mothers and daughters that goes back farther than I can understand.

Miguel must have sensed my struggle. He looked at me and told me that the Taino people had painted their ceremonies on cave walls, which read as accounts of those times, the revelations and traditions and manifestations that occurred. “You are one of those cave painters on those cave walls,” he told me. Dayvanna agreed.

I don’t know if they knew that this week, with what we’ve been dealing with in our newsroom, these words, this beautiful expression of forgiveness and understanding, would give me the strength and clarity of purpose I need to carry through. There’s still more work to do (okay, a lot of work to do), but I’ll never forget that moment.

When we sat with Gary Fisher months before his own fatal OD, he foreshadowed the abandonment he would pass on from his own childhood to his daughter’s.

“Abandonment’s a big thing, it was a big thing for me. I was abandoned by one person that I didn’t think should ever abandon me. And I fear that for my daughter, that she’s going to wonder why dad left, why he’s not around, why he died. And she’s going to have questions and she’s never going to get answers. And that feeling that I live with on a daily basis, I don’t want anybody to go through. And I don’t want her to feel like I gave her up.”

We went back to Gary’s daughter’s house in McKeesport, Pa. as she struggles with the anxiety of the bullying and night terrors she is experiencing in the wake of her father’s death. Her story is part of the final chapter of Needle in the Family Tree, a yearlong look at how the opioid and overdose epidemic is impacting families in Western Pennsylvania. Head to the Post-Gazette here for more.

Pennsylvania road trip. More always, here.

At top: A moonshiner peeks out from his cook shack as he makes a batch of moonshine in southern West Virginia.

I’m stoked to share my first assignment for ESPN on West Virginia’s unique culture around moonshine, football, and the Mountaineers. I met some truly awesome and fascinating people who taught me the economic and legal history of the strong stuff, the difference between sugar shine and shine made with corn whiskey, and in a yellow-leaved holler in the dark of night, how to make it in small batches. Mostly, I got to see how moonshine is a point of pride that brings people together and marks times to celebrate.

From the story by Jake Trotter: “Don’t take West Virginians as nothing but hillbillies that drink moonshine blah, blah, blah. That’s not who we are. Moonshine is a way to bring generations together… and West Virginia’s one big family.”

Today on Overdose Awareness Day, a story of hope is building in Pittsburgh’s OD captiol of Carrick.

Self-described “recovering addict” and former drug dealer Gus DiRenna leads a prayer with a crew of people in recovery as they start work to turn a drug den in the neighborhood into a “Serenity House” for people working on their sobriety and starting a new chapter in their life. The process feeds into DiRenna’s simple formula: people in recovery need a decent room, a job and a community of support. “It just takes not talking at somebody, but reaching your hand out and helping them up, it gets them their hope,” said DiRenna. He opened up the home for a preview open house so that the community could see the transformation the space would make:

“He was facing cracked windows, crumbling plaster, a charred kitchen, a shower wall held together with tape … all the features you’d expect in a 117-year-old, five-bedroom house that ended up on the block watch’s list of drug hotspots. “See, when I look at this, I see opportunity, job training, kids making a little bit of money,” said Mr. DiRenna, recovery director of the ARK Allegheny Recovery Krew. “There’s going to be a lot of laughter and fun going on in here.”“

Read more here about the series of Serenity Houses DiRenna and his crew are building in their attempt to turn “OD Road” into “Recovery Road.”