‘Heartbroken’: staff laid off as California TV station abruptly closes newsroom; The Guardian, September 25, 2025

 Dani Anguiano, The Guardian; ‘Heartbroken’: staff laid off as California TV station abruptly closes newsroom

[Kip Currier: This is another stark indicator of the dangers that media consolidation represents. Media consolidation impedes the ability of citizens to access information, particularly local information. Informed citizenries are vital for functioning democracies.]

[Excerpt] 

"This week KION-TV, a broadcast news outlet on California’s central coast that’s been on the air for more than 50 years, announced it was entering a “new chapter” with a San Francisco CBS affiliate to bring expanded coverage to its viewers...

“Our partnership with KPIX ensures that viewers across the Monterey, Salinas and Santa Cruz region continue to receive the high-quality local journalism they deserve,” Rall Bradley, an executive at the News-Press & Gazette, said...

Meanwhile, workers report that Telemundo 23, which was housed at KION, is also shutting down, leaving an area with a majority-Latino population without a Spanish-language news show.

Local news has collapsed across the US in recent decades, with a 75% drop in local journalists since 2002, according to a report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, which describes the decline as “alarming and widespread”. One in three US counties do not have the equivalent of one full-time local journalist, and an average of 2.5 newspapers shut down each week.

Monterey County Now described the development as a “devastating blow” to local journalism. Jeanette Bent, the station’s managing editor, told the outlet: “It’s a disservice to this community and we’re all heartbroken.”"

International media ethics teaching award for UH Mānoa professor; University of Hawai'i News, May 19, 2021

University of Hawai'i News; International media ethics teaching award for UH Mānoa professor

"A University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa journalism professor with more than 30 years of teaching experience has been internationally recognized for outstanding classroom teaching in media ethics. Professor Ann Auman is the winner of the 2021 Teaching Excellence Award in the Media Ethics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award will be formally presented to Auman at the Media Ethics Division members’ meeting on July 28.

The award committee was impressed by Auman’s work, “incorporating Indigenous values and ethics in a cross-cultural media ethics course and classroom.” Auman’s ethics courses are Communications/Journalism 460: Media Ethics and Communications 691: Emergent Media Ethics Across Cultures: Truth-Seeking in the Global, Digital Age.

“I believe that journalism can be improved if we honor Indigenous values, culture and language in storytelling. Western-based ethics codes and practices need to be reformed, and more Indigenous people should tell their own stories,” Auman said. “Everyone should practice media ethics, not just journalists. In this disinformation age we are empowered if we learn how to distinguish the truth from falsehood and deception, and be ethical producers and consumers of news and information.”

Auman also teaches courses in news literacy and multimedia journalism. Her research is in cross-cultural media ethics with a focus on Indigenous media ethics. Auman’s recent published works include, “Traditional Knowledge for Ethical Reporting on Indigenous Communities: A Cultural Compass for Social Justice” in Ethical Space: The International Journal of Media Ethics; “The Hawaiian Way: How Kuleana can Improve Journalism” in the Handbook of Global Media Ethics; and “Ethics Without Borders in a Digital Age” in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator."

IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN COMIC BOOK JOURNALISM: THE POLITICS OF X-MEN: RED; Comic Watch, April 18, 2020

Bethany W Pope, Comic Watch; IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN COMIC BOOK JOURNALISM: THE POLITICS OF X-MEN: RED

"It’s extremely rare for a run of a mainstream comic to result in a story with as much philosophical complexity and clarity of vision as Tom Taylor’s (shamefully abbreviated) X-Men: Red. Because the author set out to tell ‘the best X-Men story’ he could, and because he managed (somehow) to gain something close to free-reign from editorial (as well as having the good luck of being paired with some truly remarkable artists; most notably Mahmud Asrar) the end result was not only the best continuous X-Man story of the decade, but something which will (in time) surpass Whedon’s revolutionary run on Astonishing in terms of fan-regard. In this article, I am going to pick (a little) at the weave of the story in an effort to isolate and reveal a few of the integral threads which form the weft of the narrative.

The central thesis of these eleven issues is that the act of compassion is a more powerful tool than the most brutally cinematic superpower. Empathy is the thing which slaughters fear. Looking at your enemy and seeing a person, woven through with hopes and loves, fears, the usual mixture of frailties, transforms disparate (possibly violent) mobs into a functional community by revealing that there is no ‘us versus them’. There’s only ‘us’. The X-Men are the perfect superhero group to make this point, because their entire existence is predicated on the phrase ‘protecting a world which fears and hates them’. The X-Men have always represented the struggle that othered groups (racial minorities, religious minorities, women, members of the LGBTQIA community) have faced when trying to live in function in a world that is slanted, dramatically, in favor of straight, white (American) men. Such a group is a necessary force in the current, fractured, geo-political climate."

Daily Beast Removes Article on Gay Olympians in Rio; New York Times, 8/12/16

Christopher Mele and Niraj Chokshi, New York Times; Daily Beast Removes Article on Gay Olympians in Rio:

"The article drew significant backlash from gay leaders and athletes.

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said on Twitter: “Thoughtless @thedailybeast piece puts LGBT athletes in danger. It should be removed & replaced w a real story about violence LGBT ppl face.”...

Robert Drechsel, who retired last week as the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described the article as “thoughtless, insensitive and unethical.”

He said it was good that the article had been removed but that it came too late.

“It’s hard to find the words to describe,” he said. “Why in the world — why in the world of journalism — would anyone do this?”"