AUSTINTOWN — The drizzle and overcast skies over the Mahoning Valley set the mood as members of the Youngstown Press Club gathered Saturday afternoon to honor fallen journalists.

Fifteen members of the club stood before fellow journalists and communication specialists at the Mill Creek MetroParks’ Kirk Road Pavilion and, one by one, read the names of journalists killed in the profession in 2024.

The number of names reached 103 for the year — the highest since the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, — started tracking those numbers in 1992.

The event comes as part of other World Press Freedom Day celebrations across the world.

Dennis Mangan, a former Vindicator staffer who spent 41 years with the paper as a reporter and in various editing roles until retiring in 2013, explained that World Press Freedom Day went beyond being a “journalistic Memorial Day” as part of his remarks before reading the first six names, spanning Bangladesh, Burma, Haiti and India.

“It is a day to think about the importance of press freedom, of having it and preserving it when it is under attack and whether you can have a democracy and publish it,” Mangan said. “Frankly, the job of protecting press freedom falls mainly to all of us — veterans of the news business in its many forms, because let’s admit it, we aren’t Clark Kent or Lois Lane.”

In Bangladesh, Abu Taher Md Turab was a reporter for the Daily Jalalabad and Daily Naya Diganta newspapers. He was wearing a press vest when he was fatally shot by police firing into a procession of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party in northeast Sylhet city. He was covering deadly nationwide protests over government job quotas.

In India, Ashutosh Srivastava, a correspondent with the Hindu right-wing news channel Sudarshan News and a member of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, was shot several times by unknown assailants while riding his motorcycle at an intersection outside the city of Jaunpur.

Seventy-seven of the 103 journalists named were in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, while an additional two, camera operators Ghassan Najjar and Wissam Kassem, died when an Israeli airstrike hit a compound housing 18 journalists from multiple media outlets in Hasbaya, a town in southern Lebanon.

A Kurdish journalist and video editor from Chatr Multimedia Production Company, Gulistan Tara and Hero Bahadin, made up two of the three casualties in Iraq when a Turkish drone strike hit their unmarked car near Goptapa village in Iraqi Kurdistan’s northeastern Sulaymaniyah province.

Jonathan Cambouris, who concluded the list of names with journalists from Sudan and Syria, had no ties to local media organizations. He explained later that he was still there to honor fallen journalists regardless because of their servitude to the occupation.

“They have a service to their field of work, and they have the service to report as ethically as they can on the facts that are presented,” Cambouris said. “By them exploring those facts, they were in the line of duty. And that’s all they were attempting to do — their job.”

Cambouris admitted it was tough to keep his composure as he recalled the 77 journalists who died in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as it proved that wars go beyond the battlefield.

“Wars aren’t just fought on the battlefield, and I think that’s the most important thing for people who are so far removed from this violence to understand,” Cambouris said. “The situation is larger than gunfire, but gunfire is part of it.”