Block Communications, which owns Pittsburgh’s major daily newspaper, announced today that it plans to shutter the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is now scheduled to publish its last edition on Sunday, May 3. According to the newspaper, the Block family expressed its regret on how this would impact the Pittsburgh region, and that it was “proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century.”
The owners said they lost roughly $350 million on the newspaper over the past 20 years. They also pointed to an outdated labor-management operating environment that no longer made it feasible to continue operating.
If you live in any major American city, you’ve seen this story play out in your own backyard. The internet changed everything and put newspapers out of business, you were told. So, one by one, America’s major dailies folded. The few that remain often print an actual newspaper just a few days a week, and not seven as they once did.
We’ll get into some of the reasons for all of this in a second, but for posterity, let's look at the Post-Gazette’s journey to this point and how it got here in the most basic sense.
The morning daily traces its origins to 1786, when it was first published as the Pittsburgh Gazette on July 29, 1786. For perspective, the country had no president at this time. George Washington would only become president in 1789.
In 1927, the Pittsburgh Gazette merged with the Pittsburgh Post and adopted the combined name Post-Gazette.
The town had other newspapers around that time, but the Post-Gazette was always a mainstay and the lone survivor.
More recently, with the dawn of the internet age around 2000, online advertising sites like Craigslist and others put a dent in the daily’s revenue stream. Soon, blogs and other internet sites would steal the attention of readers who started to diversify their news and information sources.
Social media came along in this same time period and turned all of media on its head. Like many newspapers run by ink-stained fossils who didn’t understand the meaning of words like “innovation” and “entrepreneurialism,” the Post-Gazette got passed up at every turn. Still, it found a way to hang on and innovate just enough that you never really thought the newspaper would go under.
In 2018, the paper’s newsroom staff went on strike. It was long and ugly. To keep putting out a paper, management turned to non-union people, exacerbating an already toxic relationship with its reporters and editors.
The newsroom couldn’t keep up with the news the way it once did. It relied on younger people with little to no institutional knowledge of the paper, the town, or the beats they covered, and it showed.
The COVID-19 pandemic came along at a time when this newspaper could least afford it, and before long it was cutting back on how many days a week it would actually print a newspaper. When you do this, you start to wean your older readers off of their daily habit. They become less reliant on you, and a downward spiral in readership and circulation accelerates.
That’s the roadmap to where the newspaper is today, but it’s not the only reason the newspaper is about to close down.
Newspaper Staffs Live in a Bubble
My relationship with the paper evolved. I worked in the Sports Department as a stringer while in college, watching the ticker for baseball scores until 2 a.m. on some nights.
In my early 20s, when I was in between jobs for a few months, I returned to the Post-Gazette as a stringer, covering school board and suburban town council meetings.
Not long after that, I landed in the public relations field, and my office was literally across the street from the newspaper, where I had a hall pass to go in and chat with the people I knew in the newsroom. When I pitched stories for clients, I sometimes used the phone, but a few times, I just walked over to the newsroom and did it that way. For a news junkie like me, this wasn’t heaven, but it wasn’t purgatory, either.
Because I saw a few of these reporters up close, I gained some real insights into what made them tick. More than a few were some of the most petty and catty people I've known.
While I personally have always leaned to the right politically, for the better part of my career, politics didn’t drive the news cycle the way it does now. Political news was its own beat and there wasn’t the crossover like there is today. I never knew the politics of most business, sports, or features reporters, and I couldn’t see it in their work.
Today, a reporter can’t even cover the TV and entertainment beat without making political calculations with every word.
To be sure, most newsrooms were filled with libs, and the Post-Gazette was always jam-packed with them. Up until a couple of decades ago, those leanings just didn’t seep into the product as much.
But about 20 years ago, this started to shift. I’d see more and more leftist assumptions written into straight news articles. When I interacted with the paper’s reporters, I quickly learned that if I proposee anything that even hinted of conservatism, or if a story angle was so much as fair to a George W. Bush (before we knew what a disappointment he'd become), it would get shot down.
Gradually and steadily, the newspaper and its people moved further and further left, and they were more and more brazen about making wokeness the newspaper’s worldview. In fact, they were in such a bubble that they couldn’t even see how far to the left they actually were.
Editors and reporters would live in the east part of town, neighbors to each other, espousing the virtues of city public schools, while sending their kids to expensive private schools.
As a public relations professional, it was part of my job to make sure to pick up and read the newspaper, and others, every day. For years, I subscribed to the newspaper online, making it my early morning routine.
Day after day, I’d read content that was nothing more than leftist propaganda for politicians, advocacy groups, agitators, labor unions, and people from leftist identity groups. The business page wouldn’t even cover the major businesses in town, opting instead to write features about minority-owned coffee shops, or nonprofit leaders whose salaries were paid for by donations, not customers.
Entrepreneurs, innovators, and business leaders were virtually erased from the newspaper’s pages. After a while, I noticed how rare it was to even see a photo of a straight white male in the paper, that is unless he was a Democrat politician, a coach, or an athlete.
Columnists at the paper became more matter-of-fact in their attacks on readers like me – people who paid taxes, had jobs, or ran businesses. I got used to seeing at least one article a day that somehow told me that just by getting up and taking a breath that day, I was the problem.
Then one morning, I had had enough. I called the paper and cancelled my subscription. I’d find other ways to get my news. Since the paper was becoming increasingly irrelevant to my business and my clients, this was easy to do. I knew that by not reading the Post-Gazette every morning, I wasn’t missing a thing.
Now, scale this to hundreds of thousands of other people who had the same experience and did the same thing.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will cease publication in May, but it died a long time ago. It died because its commitment to wokeness superseded popular attitudes and the business discipline it takes to serve a marketplace. In short, leadership and staff put their own ideologies first, and they made their product irrelevant to the town they served. And they still have no idea.
They openly ridiculed MAGA and the populist movement that put Trump in power in 2016. They did it again in 2020. And they did it again in 2024. Time and again, in big and small ways, they just couldn’t see the formula for success and adapt.
In the TV world, if Fox News, the major conservative cable news network, is wiping the floor with the lib networks, wouldn’t it make sense to shift a little to the right? The same is true across all media. There is a demand for conservative content. But the powers that be at America's dailies have demonstrated they would rather drive their papers into the ground than betray a core leftist editorial philosophy.
Certainly, daily newspapers with legacy collective bargaining agreements, large staffs and operations, can’t pivot on a dime, but content shifts are easy. And they are the hidden reason that so many newspapers have succeeded or failed.
There’s a saying in communications: Content is king. At this Pittsburgh newspaper, it had become boring, predictable, and out of touch. At its core, this was a big reason the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won’t live to see 100.
It’s time to get the New Year off to a good start by taking advantage of the full catalogue of common sense thinking that comes with a PJ Media VIP membership. The good news is, PJ Media VIP memberships are on sale! Get 60% off of an annual VIP, VIP Gold, or VIP Platinum membership! Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off a VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member