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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?
For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.
The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.
The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.
“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”
Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”
Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.
Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)
Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.
From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”
Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.
S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.
“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”
The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.
“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”
That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.
Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)
He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.
Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)
Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.
Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.
Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.
Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.
“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.
“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.
“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”
Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.
“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.
Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.
The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.
Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.
“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”
Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.
“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”
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Swiss Eurovision Winner Nemo to Send Trophy Back in Protest Over Israel’s Participation
2024 Eurovision Song Contest winner Nemo performs during the Grand Final of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, May 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Swiss Eurovision winner Nemo on Thursday said they were handing back their trophy in the latest protest about Israel’s continued participation in the contest over the war in Gaza.
Nemo, the non-binary singer who won in 2024 with “The Code,” a drum-and-bass, opera, rap and rock song, said Israel’s continued participation went against the contest’s ideals of inclusion and dignity for all people.
The comments are the latest protest against the European Broadcasting Union, the Eurovision organizer that has seen five countries pull out after it cleared Israel last week to take part in next year’s event in Austria.
“Eurovision says it stands for unity, for inclusion, and dignity for all people. And these are the values that make this contest so meaningful for me,” Nemo said in a post on Instagram.
“But Israel’s continued participation, during what the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry (on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel) has concluded to be a genocide, shows there’s a clear conflict between those ideals and the decisions the EBU is making.”
Israel has repeatedly rejected any accusation of genocide, saying it has respected international law and has a right to defend itself after the cross-border Hamas-led attack from Gaza on October 7, 2023, that precipitated the war.
Iceland will not take part in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, the country’s public broadcaster RUV said on Wednesday, joining Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Slovenia who have also pulled out, citing Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.
Nemo said it was clear something was deeply wrong when countries pulled out of the contest, adding they would send their Eurovision trophy back to the EBU’s headquarters in Geneva.
“This is not about individuals or artists. It’s about the fact that the contest was repeatedly used to soften the image of a state accused of severe wrongdoing, all while the EBU insists that this contest is non-political,” Nemo said.
The singer said they had a clear message for the EBU, which organizes the contest that reaches around 160 million viewers.
“Live what you claim. If the values we celebrate on stage aren’t lived off stage, then even the most beautiful songs become meaningless,” Nemo said.
“I’m waiting for the moment those words and actions align. Until then, this trophy is yours.”
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US Aims for International Gaza Force Deployment Early Next Year, Say US Officials
The Beaver Moon supermoon rises above destroyed buildings amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
International troops could be deployed in the Gaza Strip as early as next month to form a UN-authorized stabilization force, two US officials told Reuters, but it remains unclear how Palestinian terrorist group Hamas will be disarmed.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the International Stabilization Force (ISF) would not fight Hamas. They said lots of countries had expressed interest in contributing and US officials are currently working out the size of the ISF, composition, housing, training, and rules of engagement.
An American two-star general is being considered to lead the ISF but no decisions have been made, the officials said.
Deployment of the force is a key part of the next phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Under the first phase, a fragile ceasefire in the two-year war began on Oct. 10 and Hamas has released hostages and Israel has freed detained Palestinians.
“There is a lot of quiet planning that’s going on behind the scenes right now for phase two of the peace deal,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday. “We want to ensure an enduring and lasting peace.”
INDONESIA PREPARING TROOPS
Indonesia has said it is prepared to deploy up to 20,000 troops to take on health and construction-related tasks in Gaza.
“It is still in the planning and preparation stages,” said Rico Sirait, spokesperson of the Indonesian Defense Ministry. “We are now preparing the organizational structure of the forces to be deployed.”
Israel still controls 53% of Gaza, while nearly all the 2 million people in the enclave live in the remaining Hamas-held area. The plan – which needs to be finalized by the so-called Board of Peace – is for the ISF to deploy in the area held by Israel, the US officials said.
Then, according to the Trump peace plan, as the ISF establishes control and stability, Israeli troops will gradually withdraw “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization.”
A UN Security Council resolution adopted on Nov. 17 authorized a Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish the ISF. Trump said on Wednesday that an announcement on which world leaders will serve on the Board of Peace will be made early next year.
DEMILITARIZING GAZA
The Security Council authorized the ISF to work alongside newly trained and vetted Palestinian police to stabilize security “by ensuring the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip, including the destruction and prevention of rebuilding of the military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, as well as the permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”
However, it remains unclear exactly how that would work.
US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz noted on Thursday that the ISF was authorized by the Security Council to demilitarize Gaza by all means necessary – which means use of force.
“Obviously that’ll be a conversation with each country,” he told Israel’s Channel 12, adding that discussions on rules of engagement were under way.
Hamas has said the issue of disarmament hasn’t been discussed with them formally by the mediators – the US, Egypt, and Qatar – and the group’s stance remains that it will not disarm until a Palestinian state is established.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on Sunday that the second phase would move toward demilitarization and disarmament.
“Now that raises a question: Our friends in America want to try and establish a multinational task force to do the job,” he said. “I told them I welcome it. Are volunteers here? Be my guest,” Netanyahu said.
“We know there are certain tasks that this force can perform … but some things are beyond their abilities, and perhaps the main thing is beyond their abilities, but we will see about that,” he said.
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Irish Minister Defends ‘Limited’ Trade Curbs on Israeli Settlements
A bicycle with the Palestinian and Irish flags is seen at the University College Dublin (UCD) ‘Palestinian Liberation Encampment’ on June 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne
Ireland’s planned curbs on trade with Israeli settlements will be limited strictly to goods, a minister told Reuters, offering the first clear signal on the scope of the contested legislation and rejecting accusations that the country is antisemitic.
Ireland has been preparing a law to curb trade with Israeli communities in the West Bank, facing pressure at home to widen the scope of the ban from goods to services, while Israel and the United States want the bill scrapped.
Ireland has been one of the European Union’s most outspoken critics of Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
‘EXTREMELY LIMITED MEASURE,’ SAYS MINISTER
But Thomas Byrne, Ireland’s Minister of State for European Affairs and Defense, told Reuters that the bill is limited to the import of goods and that it would not become law this year.
“It’s an extremely limited measure, which would prohibit imports of goods from illegally-occupied territories,” he said in an interview. “Similar measures have already been brought in in a number of European countries.”
Byrne’s comments give insight into Dublin’s thinking as Ireland seeks to deflect pressure, including from US companies based in the country, to soften its criticism of Israel. Ireland’s bill is expected to help shape how other European nations launch similar curbs on trade with Israeli settlements.
The Irish government has signaled the bill is imminent but has yet to publicly announce its scope.
Byrne declined to say when it would be sent to parliament, as the government weighs the bill’s implications. “It’s certainly not going to be implemented this year,” he said.
Earlier this year, sources told Reuters that the government intended to blunt the law, curbing its scope to just a limited trade of goods, such as dried fruit, and not services.
That more ambitious move could have entangled companies in technology and other industries in Ireland doing business in Israel. Business lobby groups had sought to kill the idea.
Limiting the bill to goods only would catch just a handful of products imported from Israeli settlements such as fruit that are worth just 200,000 euros ($234,660) a year.
LAWMAKER BLACK SAYS SHE STILL WANTS SERVICES BAN
Much of the international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law.
Israel disputes this, citing historical and biblical ties to the area. It says the settlements provide strategic depth and security. Defenders of Israel also note that, while about one-fifth of the country’s population is Arab and enjoys equal rights, Palestinian law forbids selling any land to Israelis.
On Gaza, Israel says it acted in self-defense following the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages. Israel has repeatedly said it is committed to international law and tries to minimize harm to the civilian population of Gaza.
Frances Black, the lawmaker who proposed the Irish bill, told Reuters she would push to include a ban on services. “It will take a lot of work in the new year to get services included but that’s exactly what I’m prepared to do.”
Byrne also defended Ireland’s government, after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar recently posted a video online where he accused the Irish government of having an “antisemitic nature.”
Saar said the Irish government’s response had been slow to a local proposal to rename a park bearing the name of Chaim Herzog, the former president of Israel who was raised in Dublin.
Irish ministers had roundly criticized the idea and Dublin City Council has since delayed a decision on whether to remove the name.
US Senator Lindsey Graham had also labeled Ireland a “cesspool of antisemitism.”
EU LAWMAKER REJECTS ANTISEMITISM CHARGE AS ‘NONSENSE’
“I reject outright that the country is in any way antisemitic,” said Byrne. “We’re deeply conscious of the contribution that Jewish people have made in Ireland.”
Ireland’s relations with Israel have been fraught. Last December, Israel shut its embassy in Dublin amid a row over Ireland’s criticism of its war in Gaza, including Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state last year.
Barry Andrews, an Irish member of the European parliament, urged Dublin to go ahead with its “occupied territories” bill. “Claims that Ireland is antisemitic are nonsense,” he said. Ireland has nothing to fear. We are no longer the only ones doing this.”
On Wednesday, Ireland’s central bank governor Gabriel Makhlouf was forced to abandon a public speech in Dublin by pro-Palestinian protesters objecting to the central bank’s earlier role in the sale of Israeli bonds.