This is a special end-of-year edition of Open Tabs, your weekly roundup of Poynter’s best journalism. Subscribe to get three must-read stories in your inbox every Friday.

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If you’ve spent any time on this site this year, or paid even passing attention to media news, you already know the throughline that unites many of our top stories: press freedom.

Just like 2024, and 2023, and 2022, it was another tough year for journalism and those who recognize its importance in our democracy. But while recent years were defined largely by financial hardship, the profession took some body blows from a new place in 2025: the federal government.

Still, press freedom wasn’t the only story that defined the media — or that captured our readers’ attention — this year. Read on for some journalism success stories, reexaminations of longstanding myths and legends, surprising moments of “personal news” (as we like to call it), generational divides and classic memes that reveal just how much the industry has changed.

These reflect a mix of what you read most, what sparked the most conversation and a handful of pieces our editors couldn’t stop thinking about, presented in chronological order.

Thanks for reading Poynter this year.

Here are all the journalism terms you need to know, defined

Oh, the panic I felt a few years ago when an editor left handwritten notes on my desk and I couldn’t remember what “stet” meant. (It stands for “let it stand,” a copy desk way of saying, “My bad, please ignore this edit.”)

Where was this article then?

Poynter staff, led by our audience engagement producer TyLisa C. Johnson, assembled a comprehensive list of journalism terms and their definitions. Many of you must have bookmarked it — it keeps resurfacing in our real-time analytics.

A rare newspaper war was brewing in Baltimore. Then a billionaire owner began meddling.

For a moment, Baltimore looked like a utopian vision of local journalism’s future. Two well-resourced newsrooms competed to serve the same city, pushing each other to do deeper, better reporting.

Angela Fu’s deeply reported look at The Baltimore Sun and the upstart Baltimore Banner showed what happens when that promise collides with reality.

A change in ownership at the Sun — and the influence of a politically motivated billionaire — began to reshape that newsroom. Meanwhile, a race to meet editorial and financial expectations at the Banner tested whether nonprofit local news can scale fast enough to compete.

In a year defined by questions about power, press freedom and who gets to shape the news, Baltimore offered a sobering test of how fragile even the most promising local journalism experiments can be.

I’m a Gen Z journalist. My generation doesn’t know what that means.

As an editor, sometimes — not often — a pitch lands in my inbox like a stray bolt of lightning from a distant storm. This was one of those.

Olivia Hicks, a freelance sports journalist who covers Formula 1, reached out to say her Substack essay about generational understandings of journalism had resonated with readers. Would Poynter be interested in an adaptation?

Yes, yes, yes. (I still think about a moment nearly 20 years ago when a college peer asked my future wife whether “journalism” meant she wrote journals for a living.)

The piece landed because it put words to a quiet, unsettling shift many journalists have sensed but struggled to articulate. Hicks traces how Gen Z’s blurred understanding of journalism — especially in sports — collides with influencer culture and brand access, raising urgent questions about ethics, trust and who controls the narrative as creators play a larger role in news.

She got a tip about four human brains stored at the Smithsonian. The investigation revealed so much more.

Our readers couldn’t look away from the story behind one of 2024’s most powerful investigations. TyLisa C. Johnson’s story on how Washington Post reporters uncovered the Smithsonian’s hidden “racial brain collection” pulled back the curtain on the reporting process itself, in which a stray tip led to a newsroomwide reckoning.

The piece resonated because it showed what accountability journalism actually looks like up close: patience, collaboration, ethical care for sources and an insistence on following a story even when it becomes heavier than anyone expected.

In a year when journalism’s value was constantly questioned, this was a reminder of why deep, sustained reporting still matters.

A decade ago, The Dress united and divided us. It couldn’t happen now.

Blue and black. White and gold. The question didn’t matter nearly as much as the one Poynter faculty member Megan Griffith-Greene asks in hindsight: What did that dumb dress reveal about the media ecosystem we were living in at the time?

It went beyond peak virality, she argues. It was the last gasp of a specific media era in which a single, silly moment could briefly dominate every platform at once. Today’s fragmented, algorithm-driven feeds make that kind of shared experience nearly impossible. What felt harmless and unifying in 2015 now reads like a warning about how our brains process information, how confident we are in what we “see” and how easily that confidence can be exploited.

Ten years on, the dress looks less like a meme and more like a hinge point.

In a nation of news deserts, are there news rainforests, too? If so, where?

Local news may be collapsing in much of the country, but Rick Edmonds noticed something counterintuitive: Some places keep attracting more journalism.

Big cities, statewide nonprofits and a handful of well-resourced mid-sized communities are becoming “news rainforests,” or ecosystems where outlets cluster, compete and grow. These places tend to have money, talent, broadband, philanthropy and leadership already in place — conditions that make new ventures viable, but also mean the communities most in need of news are least likely to get it.

In a year dominated by talk of news deserts, Rick gave us a sharper, slightly unsettling frame: The future of local journalism may be less about revival everywhere and more about the rich getting richer.

You’re a journalist added to a classified group chat. Here’s what you need to consider.

In a year full of strange media moments, few were stranger than this: The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group chat where senior U.S. officials appeared to be discussing airstrikes in Yemen.

The government insisted the information wasn’t sensitive. Goldberg published the messages. Signalgate was born.

The moment was surreal. And clarifying. Senior vice president and ethics chair Kelly McBride used it to walk through what journalists should actually do if they stumble into sensitive or classified information: how to verify what’s real, where loyalty lies, when transparency becomes harm and why restraint can be as important as publication.

In a year when press norms were repeatedly stress-tested, the piece stood out for slowing the moment down and asking what responsibility actually looks like.

Barbara Walters didn’t just break barriers. She rewrote the rules. Then she did it again.

If you’re going to sum up one of the most consequential careers in American journalism, distilling it into three moments feels almost reckless. And yet staff writer Amaris Castillo pulls it off with clarity, restraint and a sharp sense of why Barbara Walters mattered — and still does.

The piece traces Walters’ legacy through three reinventions: becoming the first woman to co-anchor a network evening newscast, perfecting the modern televised interview and then building “The View,” a show that permanently reshaped daytime television and political conversation.

Amaris’ story goes beyond a greatest-hits list, making a compelling case about power, access and how Walters kept finding new ways to change the medium when the old doors closed.

The story is part of The Poynter 50, our yearlong project marking Poynter’s 50th anniversary by revisiting 50 people and moments that transformed journalism in ways that still shape the work today.

Here are the winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes

Each year, the entire extended newsroom assembles in a conference room to report on American journalism’s most prestigious awards. And each year, that coverage is among our most-read stories. You could draw a lot of conclusions from that, but I choose to believe it reflects something simple: Readers still want to see what journalism looks like at its very best.

Terry Moran is out at ABC News. His tweet did what critics of the media wanted.

Some things only clarify with hindsight. This wasn’t one of them. It was immediately clear that ABC News correspondent Terry Moran’s late-night tweets about President Donald Trump and Trump adviser Stephen Miller were ill-advised.

Moran called Trump and Miller “world-class haters,” writing that Miller was “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and that “his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment.”

Moran was already at the end of his contract. ABC News chose not to renew it. And as senior media writer Tom Jones explains, the episode handed critics of the press exactly what they want: a moment that reinforces their narrative and further erodes trust in journalism, with consequences that extend well beyond one tweet.

Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality.

Every journalist knows the story: Craigslist ate classifieds, classifieds paid for newsrooms and, soon after, everything fell apart. So when we revisited that moment for The Poynter 50, it felt like a formality.

Instead, Rick Edmonds did what Rick did best. He complicated the myth. Yes, Craigslist mattered. Craig Newmark himself admits as much in the story. But Rick traces how newspapers’ deeper problem wasn’t one website, but years of declining readership, slow adaptation and missed chances to reinvent their business before disruption hit full force.

The takeaway lands with uncomfortable clarity. Craigslist became a convenient villain, a symbol of change that newspapers struggled to navigate. But it didn’t pull the trigger.

The Washington Post loses its biggest star yet: sports columnist Sally Jenkins

The Washington Post spent much of this year on a rollercoaster, soaring on the strength of its journalism while absorbing the steady churn of staff departures. But one exit landed with particular force.

Sally Jenkins, who Tom Jones said “just might be the best sports columnist in the country,” took a buyout and headed to The Atlantic. Her farewell memo was lyrical and devastating: “So, it’s with a spear in my heart that I separate from you,” she wrote.

In a year defined by upheaval at the Post, her exit underscored the cost of change.

A few months later, Jenkins joined Tom Jones on “The Poynter Report Podcast” to reflect on the move and what came next.

Nexstar’s takeover of Tegna would require an overhaul of FCC ownership rules

When Al Tompkins reported in August that Nexstar’s proposed $6.2 billion takeover of Tegna would blow past the Federal Communications Commission’s longstanding ownership cap, it looked like a familiar, if massive, media consolidation story. Broadcasters wanted scale. Regulators would have to bend. Critics warned local journalism would pay the price.

In hindsight, the story is even more consequential. The deal put a spotlight on FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s growing willingness to reinterpret or outright discard guardrails meant to protect competition in broadcast media and foreshadowed how media ownership, political pressure and regulatory power would collide repeatedly in the months that followed.

Carr and the FCC appear poised to play an even larger role in shaping the media landscape in the year ahead.

Press Freedom Watch

When the Trump administration began rolling out policy changes, investigations and funding cuts that affected journalists, the sheer volume made the pattern hard to see. One story blurred into the next.

So we asked media business reporter Angela Fu to start tracking them. The result is Press Freedom Watch, a living database documenting federal actions that affect the free press, from lawsuits and investigations to funding cuts and detentions.

It currently includes 76 entries, and it’s still growing. The goal is clarity: a record of how government power is being used, and tested, against journalism, in one place.

Can a print journalist become a TV reporter? Some face significant challenges. Others find success.

Some time ago, we got a tip that a much-touted program meant to retrain print reporters for television wasn’t living up to its promise. After months of reporting, what Amaris Castillo dug up was less a failure than a parable about how hard professional reinvention can be.

Her investigation into Scripps’ Journalism Journey Initiative found an ambitious experiment colliding with the realities of broadcast news culture. Some participants thrived, finding new confidence and new careers. Others struggled, burned out or left journalism altogether. The common thread was just how difficult it is to switch mediums, especially between platforms with entirely different rhythms, demands and expectations.

The story resists easy conclusions. Instead, it shows what reinvention actually looks like inside a shrinking industry. It’s uneven, uncertain and often messy, even for those who thrive.

My journey into the artificial world of Sora 2

OpenAI’s splashiest new product this year was a full-on social network disguised as a video generator. And when Poynter AI expert Alex Mahadevan got an invite to Sora 2, he did what any responsible journalist would do — spent hours doomsrolling so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

What he found was a surreal mix of technical brilliance and cultural rot. Dead comedians doing bad standup. Jesus as an influencer. Pikachu being roasted over a fire and other copyright nightmares.

Hyperrealistic videos that could spread disinformation in minutes and the uncanny feeling that these tools are already far ahead of the guardrails needed to contain them.

The technology is astonishing. The vibes are rancid. And that combination may tell us more about the year in AI than anything else we published.

Rick Edmonds chronicled the media business with savvy, care and wit

Rick Edmonds spent decades doing something singular in journalism: making sense of the business of news without reducing it to math. He understood balance sheets and corporate strategy, but wrote with an unshakable focus on the people those decisions landed on.

Rick never acted like the smartest person in the room, even when he was. He listened. He mentored younger reporters. He followed stories that exposed dysfunction, but always understood their human cost. When he wrote about layoffs, consolidation or failed strategies, he did so with empathy for the journalists affected and an insistence on telling the truth anyway.

Rick died this year at 78. His reporting — and the way he carried himself — remains a model for how to cover power thoughtfully, rigorously and with grace. I have missed him every day since.

When the White House press secretary says ‘your mom,’ it’s not a joke. It’s the message.

In late October, a HuffPost reporter asked a basic question about why President Donald Trump planned to meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest, a city loaded with historical meaning for Ukraine.

The White House press secretary replied: “Your mom did.”

Then she bragged about it online.

It wasn’t a joke. It was a demonstration of power, and a reminder that this White House sees press access as something to mock and attempt to control.

Bari Weiss was expected to shake up CBS News. Instead, her first big move sticks to the script.

When CBS hired Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, the assumption was that disruption would follow. She was an outsider. She’d bring a reset. Or at least something unexpected.

That’s why her first marquee decision — naming Tony Dokoupil anchor of the “CBS Evening News” — landed with a thud.

Dokoupil is experienced and capable — and entirely conventional. As Tom Jones writes, it’s the kind of hire that would have made sense in 1975, 1985 or 1995, just not from a figure brought in to challenge legacy thinking.

In a year when Weiss dominated media conversations, her opening act at CBS turned out to be the safest possible choice.

Why Peter Vecsey is spending the fourth quarter on the bench

For decades, Peter Vecsey’s reporting defined the NBA news cycle. His scoops, columns and TV hits helped define the modern sports insider, long before Woj bombs and push alerts.

Pete Croatto’s reported profile looks at Vecsey now, more than a decade into retirement, and uses his career as a measuring stick for how profoundly sports media — and journalism itself — has changed. The access is gone. The tempo is faster. The power has shifted from writers to leagues, players and platforms.

Vecsey remains sharp, profane and unapologetically himself. But the industry he dominated no longer exists. Pete’s piece makes clear just how much has been reshuffled since it moved on.