Can data stay encrypted unless I'm eliminated?
If your friends and the reporters can decrypt the data without any action from you, then even if you're alive they should be able decrypt. You could trust a certain threshold of them to not collude with each other unless they're certain you're dead, in which case secret sharing the key might work.

If you trust your parties to publish the secret material as soon as they can get it (and not destroy it), something like this might also work: suppose you hide the key in a certain location, encrypt the location such that breaking (brute-forcing) the encryption will take at least $t$ time given a large amount of computational power, and send the encrypted location to all the parties. Before $t$ time is up, you move the key to a new location, and again encrypt the location to all the parties. This way, even if you don't trust the parties to not collude, they will not be able to access it as long as you keep moving the key in time.