Back in January I chronicled the death of a local newspaper daily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which at the time was slated to close for good in May. I listed the many reasons for the newspaper’s demise and how it served as a great example of why so many American daily newspapers have expired. The newspaper industry would have you believe that the massive decline in America’s dailies was driven only by changes to news delivery technologies, but it’s much more than that, and yet they are related.
Yes, the internet has made the need for an actual paper newspaper unnecessary, but that doesn’t explain why so many of these news organizations continued to decline even as they embraced the internet, social media, podcasting, and so many more on-trend platforms.
My contention in January, as now, is that news consumers get their news from sources they trust. This is common knowledge in the media and communications fields. People pick the source; the source no longer picks them. And we tend to pick sources that agree with our worldview. That’s why you are here on PJ Media, and you’re not right now listening to Barack Obama’s groupies over at Pod Save America.
We live in ”media silos” which ensure that no regular listener of Pod Save America ever hears what we’re talking about here, and we never hear what they are saying there, unless of course they say something that ends up going viral on the X platform. More often than not, however, an algorithm looks at what you seem to really like, and it gives you more of that.
In my January eulogy for the Post-Gazette being declared dead by its long-time owner, Block Communications, I wrote:
It died because its commitment to wokeness superseded popular attitudes and the business discipline it takes to serve a marketplace.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.
Since January, the Post-Gazette was saved, if that’s what you want to call it.
A Baltimore-based nonprofit news outlet called the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism bought the Pittsburgh “daily” at a bargain-basement price. When making the announcement, Venetoulis pointed to its track record in salvaging local news organizations, and it said it had no plans to cut back on the newspaper’s editorial or distribution schedule. When the purchase was announced, most reports alluded to the likelihood that Venetoulis would be cutting personnel and making other changes.
A moral win for the 240-year-old newspaper, but none of this changes the challenges the Post-Gazette faces. People still get their news elsewhere in growing numbers. So, unless Venetoulis makes changes to the product that the marketplace wants, the Post-Gazette will continue to fade in influence.
Speaking of changes, one of the most significant content changes the nonprofit newspaper made was the elimination of its editorial section.
In an editorial on May 3, 2026, the newspaper announced it would no longer “support or oppose public policies or candidates for public office.” Hmmm.
Okay, so I get they won’t endorse candidates. Let’s face it, they haven’t had a great track record with endorsements of late (as with almost all other dailies in America), but the obvious reason is this: If a newspaper endorses only Democrats, who lose at the national level a lot, it’s going to lose credibility and alienate the conservatives it needs to attract to its pages. Yet if it endorses a Republican, it will lose newspaper staff, leadership won’t get invited to World Cup watch parties, or may get shunned on Parent-Teacher Night at the private schools where their kids attend. They may even lose their seat on the board of the local opera or symphony.
But why decide not to “support or oppose public policies”? I would think that’s why newspapers exist in the first place. Imagine Ben Franklin’s The Pennsylvania Gazette deciding in the 1770s not to take a position on public policies like the Stamp Act. What good would that have done?
Of course, there will be no shortage of opinion in the newspaper. Surely, you’ll find it in the bias that permeates stories presented as “straight news.” You’ll also find actual columns from columnists from time to time, but those will be carefully curated, of course. This will be in keeping with the inherent ideologies at play in the nonprofit management of a legacy newspaper.
Pittsburgh is hardly alone here. Gannett, the company that owns USA Today and well over 200 local newspapers, started in 2022 to reduce or totally eliminate their print opinion pages, cut back on or eliminate their editorials and syndicated columns, and even reduce the number of letters to the editor. Gannett said the reason for these changes was low readership and that “readers do not want to be lectured at or told what to think.”
Lee Enterprises, another large newspaper chain, took a scalpel to its opinion pages. It decided to eliminate the local opinion pages and replace them with a single national opinion page for all company newspapers. The revised format publishes commentary on national issues, along with columns from member teams.
The net effect, however, is that local newspapers are losing their autonomy and their ability to influence their local readers. That doesn’t mean that editorials or opinion content has been wiped out across America’s dailies. Any number of leftists columnists, local and syndicated, continue to see their content published. And for conservatives, more than 300 legacy newspapers still carry syndicated dullness from never-Trumper George Will, (85), who calls the Washington Post his editorial home.
So, if you believe that the people who have already run newspaper dailies into the ground still know what they’re doing, then you are now to believe that no one wants to read any opinion content, because no one wants to read their opinion content.
Just spit-balling here, Ms. Editor-in-Chief at local newspaper daily, but hear me out. Do ya think there’s a chance that the issue is not whether readers don’t want to read any opinion, but rather that they don’t like your opinions?
Maybe Gannett misread the tea leaves when it did research and learned, “Readers do not want to be lectured at or told what to think.” The truth is that the only opinion sections and opinion media that are declining are those that push leftist ideologies. But if you look on the right, you’ll see an opinion media sector that continues to grow, expand, and prosper.
Townhall Media is a prime example. Fox News is another. Conservative podcasts continue to dominate, as does the medium Rush Limbaugh saved with conservative talk – AM radio. In fact, the contrast between liberal opinion media and conservative opinion media is stark. People do want to consume well-crafted conservative and commonsense content that reflects their own values and what they are seeing with their own eyes. What they don’t like is some liberal lecturing them and telling them what to think, especially when it's just plain stupid.
Legacy media chiefs continue to fight to avoid seeing that their own ideologies, which drive newspaper content decisions, are what’s killing their industry.
No worries. Those of us “doing the work,” as Michelle Obama likes to say, are getting it done on the conservative side. And our side is killing it.
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