Pittsburgh’s Jordy Meiselas and MeidasTouch are fighting for journalism, and democracy itself

If the past year in Pittsburgh has proven anything, it’s that journalism is changing. The old days of hundreds-strong newsrooms , company credit cards , and credulous bothsidesism are over. The void left by axed legacy media jobs has been flooded with bad information and outright propaganda. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Some media outlets are changing how they operate (ahem), and exploring new ways of reporting — ones underpinned by compassion, humor, and even a simple willingness to say “this is bad, actually” — have sprouted like seeds after a forest fire. Perhaps no outlet exemplifies the speed of this shift quite like MeidasTouch. The “pro-democracy” outlet, which claims to be “the fastest growing independent news network in the world,” emerged during COVID and has quickly risen to the social media stratosphere with the support of rabid readership and an angry electorate rapidly getting tired of U.S. President Donald Trump’s crassness and venality. Next up for the company: WTF America?! (out Oct. 20 via Hachette), a book detailing how America got here and where we could go next. It just so happens that Jordan “Jordy” Meiselas, one of the trio of brothers who founded MeidasTouch, is a Greater Pittsburgh resident. Meiselas says he loves the area and views it as a microcosm of the country and our politics. “I’ve been living in Pittsburgh essentially since we started Meidas[Touch],” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “My wife is a Pittsburgh native, and I’ve visited here during the holidays every year since 2012, so Pittsburgh has felt like home for a while now.” The Meiselas brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordy — grew up on Long Island. The three never set out to work in media or politics, Meiselas says. “None of us came from political backgrounds,” he tells City Paper . “Ben was a civil rights attorney, Brett an Emmy-winning digital editor, and I was working in marketing.” But the COVID-19 pandemic, and Trump’s mishandlin