Block Communications announced Wednesday that it will shut down the storied Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in May. Writing at Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton confirms what I told Charlie Wolfson of Pittsburgh’s Public Source — that an actual closure would make Pittsburgh the largest city in the U.S. without a daily newspaper.
Benton, though, expresses optimism that with the feuding Block family out of the way, the path is clearer for someone else to step in. One possibility he cites: the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit foundation that already owns and operates the for-profit Philadelphia Inquirer on the other side of the state.
The Post-Gazette was once a great paper, winning its most recent Pultizer Prize in 2019 for its coverage of the mass shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue. That’s when the distinguished Boston Globe alumnus David Shribman was executive editor of the paper. After he retired, though, the paper increasingly went MAGA under one faction of the Block family.
I wrote about a particularly ugly incident in 2020 for GBH News. If you’d like to know some background about what went wrong at the Post-Gazette, here is my commentary.