Brandon Cantwell at The Tribune Chronicle:
The drizzle and overcast skies over the Mahoning Valley set the mood as members of the Youngstown Press Club gathered Saturday afternoon to honor fallen journalists.
Fifteen members of the club stood before fellow journalists and communication specialists at the Mill Creek MetroParks’ Kirk Road Pavilion and, one by one, read the names of journalists killed in the profession in 2024. The number of names reached 103 for the year — the highest since the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non-profit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, — started tracking those numbers in 1992. The event comes as part of other World Press Freedom Day celebrations across the world. Dennis Mangan, a former Vindicator staffer who spent 41 years with the paper as a reporter and in various editing roles until retiring in 2013, explained that World Press Freedom Day went beyond being a “journalistic Memorial Day” as part of his remarks before reading the first six names, spanning Bangladesh, Burma, Haiti and India. “It is a day to think about the importance of press freedom, of having it and preserving it when it is under attack and whether you can have a democracy and publish it,” Mangan said. “Frankly, the job of protecting press freedom falls mainly to all of us — veterans of the news business in its many forms, because let’s admit it, we aren’t Clark Kent or Lois Lane.”