Why closure of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feels like a referendum on media ownership in 2026
My first job in journalism was at a Pittsburgh newspaper. So I remain astonished that the owner of the biggest newspaper in town couldn't figure how to keep serving its citizens
Some of the first real news stories I ever covered in my career happened in Pittsburgh.
There was the time roadies for the bands New Edition and Guy got into a fight while setting up for a show in downtown Pittsburgh – a fight which ended when New Edition’s production manager shot and killed the security chief for Guy.
There was the young man, struggling with mental health issues, who beat his mother to death with a banister railing and then tried to get nuns at a nearby church to adopt him. And the motorcycle rodeo sponsored by Easyriders magazine where a racist member of the crowd tried to beat me up, only to be stopped by vendors on site who I had interviewed moments before.
Pittsburgh in the early 1990s was a wonderful city to start a journalism career, filled with older news consumers who made a habit of scouring their local newspaper each day. Which is why I was so heartbroken to hear that owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper have decided to close the publication in May, following their court losses against the platform’s union.
(Local TV station WTAE quoted me in their story on the closure.)
Worse, the news was delivered via an impersonal video message (image above), despite the fact that twin siblings John and Allan Block have owned and run their newspaper through their family’s company, Block Communications, Inc., for decades.
My first professional job in journalism was as a news reporter in the Northern suburbs for the Pittsburgh Press – an afternoon publication which was then the largest newspaper in the city and second-largest in the state. After a few years, the teamsters struck the Press for eight months, forcing its sale to the Post-Gazette; I was among only about 30 percent of editorial staffers at the Press to get hired by the Post-Gazette.
My impressions of the Post Gazette back then was of a newspaper which had endured a lot of trauma. The Teamsters strike had forced their paper – which was headquartered in the same building as its afternoon competition – to stop publishing. So they jumped back into covering a robust city while trying to shake off the after effects of their forced hiatus while also trying to integrate journalists from two very different newsrooms.
Fairly or not, I always saw the ownership of the paper as oddly eccentric and not that connected to Pittsburgh, given that BCI is based in Toledo, Ohio, where their other newspaper The Toledo Blade, operated. After leaving the Post-Gazette in 1993, I watched from afar as the twins seemed to become more obviously supportive of President Trump, firing an old friend, award-winning cartoonist and local institution Rob Rogers, for creating illustrations too critical of MAGAS and Trump.
Like Chicago, Pittsburgh was a gritty town filled with lots of news. Municipalities surrounding the city were always vying for independence with their own police forces, fire/rescue operations and various amount of old boy networking.
It was an environment ripe for ambitious reporters with a nose for corruption and conflict – which is why I remain astonished that a town with so much to cover will soon lack a daily newspaper to galvanize that reporting.
News that the owners claim they lost $350 million running the newspaper feels less like a justification for closure than an admission they had no idea how to revamp the newspaper for a changing economic climate. When I started my career in Pittsburgh, newspapers were still a license to print money for the most part – requiring very little managerial skill or innovation from distant owners like the Block family.
Now, decades later, they’re closing a publication which has existed as the Post-Gazette since 1927, surviving a world war, stock market crashes, civil rights movements, presidential assassinations, terrorism and insurrectionists attacks.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t survive the partisan, ham fisted ways of its owners.
I’m hopeful that a lot of my former colleagues, some of whom held tough as the union struck the paper for three years, might be able to coalesce around a new source of information and reporting for Pittsburgh. Perhaps they’ll find a way to serve the community in ways BCI never quite figured.
The newspaper’s union is asking for support by getting people who believe the city should have quality independent journalism to sign an online petition. You can find it here - I’ve already signed!
It’s a sad harbinger for the fate of news outlets across the country; increasingly let down by classless owners who never seem to understand or truly value the newsrooms they are trying to lead.
Well said, Eric. This is a tragedy — an avoidable tragedy, I might add — not just for the reporters, editors and managers, but for the city itself. Who now monitors local, state and national government? Where is the assurance of news that is informative, solidly sourced, objective and, above all, accurate? Who feeds readers the stories that entertain, enlighten and encapsulate a diverse community whose lives provide Pittsburgh its heartbeat? The Blocks spent millions on an ill-advised, unjust quest to eradicate its unions, losing every case all the way to the Supreme Court. Among myriad bad financial decisions, they poured millions into new printing presses a few years before dumping them in pursuit of a mostly digital operation. All of this hurts. For the Blocks, it’s just another day. For their employees, it’s the first day of life-changing turmoil. Shakespeare couldn’t have written a better tragedy.
Thanks for this, Eric. What a blow for Pittsburgh. I worked for WTAE as a producer in the late 1990s. My time in Pittsburgh was not fun, but that may have been more about me than the city! Nevertheless, this sets a scary precedent: Owners who just decide to pack up their toys and say "see yinz" later.