Professional Biography

I’m Steve Mellon, a journalist on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette since October 2023. Since the day the strike began, I’ve continued to use longform storytelling to documented life in the Pittsburgh region. My work is now published in our strike newspaper, the Pittsburgh Union Progress.

After working as a journalist throughout the American Midwest and South, I came to Pittsburgh in 1989 to join the legendary staff of photojournalists at The Pittsburgh Press. There, my colleagues and I were recognized as groundbreaking photojournalists and we dominated many national newspaper photography contests until the publication's demise at the end of 1992.

I spent the next several years working as a freelance photojournalist for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fortune and Pittsburgh Magazine. I spent free time traveling to economically devastated communities to talk to those left behind when industries collapsed and jobs disappeared. I told their stories in the book, "After the Smoke Clears: Struggling to Get By in Rustbelt America," published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002.

In 1997, I began work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where I collaborated with other journalists to produce ambitious multimedia projects as well as daily stories and pictures.

In addition to my work at the Post-Gazette, I taught multimedia journalism at Duquesne University for a decade.  I live in Pittsburgh with my very patient wife Brenda and daughters Chloe, Brooke and Jessie.