PITTSBURGH (AP) \u2014 In the space of a couple of weeks this spring, Pittsburgh media has lived through a near-death experience and a resurrection.<\/p>\n
Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week announced the newspaper\u2019s sale<\/a> to a nonprofit foundation that said it was committed to keeping it open. A news outlet that predates the U.S. Constitution was due to close on May 3, which would have made the Steel City the nation\u2019s largest community without a city-based paper.<\/p>\n Weeks earlier, the alternative Pittsburgh City Paper, whose staff learned on New Year\u2019s Day that it was closing after 34 years, roared back to life<\/a> under new ownership.<\/p>\n They were rare positive developments for a local news industry that has seen its share<\/a> of the opposite over the past two decades \u2014 newsrooms shuttered or thinned out, journalists thrown out of work, consumers drifting away. No one is pretending that a true turnaround will be easy in Pittsburgh. One thing that may help is that the city faced a news abyss and was forced to prepare for it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s human nature that sometimes you have to be shaken a bit to realize what\u2019s important in your life,\u201d said Halle Stockton, co-executive director and editor-in-chief of the digital news outlet Public Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Pittsburgh Gazette was born on July 29, 1786, the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. It went through several names with the expansion and contraction of a newspaper market that supported seven at the beginning of the 20th century. There was The Commercial Gazette, the Gazette-Times and, briefly, the Pittsburgh Gazette and Manufacturing and Mercantile Advertiser.<\/p>\n A consolidation caused by the closing of the Pittsburgh Post in 1927 made it the Post-Gazette, which has remained its name for 99 years.<\/p>\n It had a solid reputation, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for its coverage of the Tree of Life<\/a> synagogue shooting. \u201cThe Post-Gazette is really the paper of record for this city,\u201d said Kevin Acklin<\/a>, chief of staff to a former Pittsburgh mayor and former president of the Penguins hockey team. The other longtime \u201cpaper of record,\u201d The Pittsburgh Press, closed in 1992 after a Teamsters Union strike. <\/p>\n Labor woes marred the Post-Gazette\u2019s last few years as well. Much of the staff was on strike between 2022 and 2025, though the newspaper limped along. Its owner, Block Communications, Inc., announced the closing<\/a> in January.<\/p>\n To anyone watching closely, a clue to the newspaper\u2019s future was revealed across town in mid-March.<\/p>\n \u201cYou thought we were dead and gone, didn\u2019t you?\u201d Ali Trachta, top editor at the Pittsburgh City Paper, wrote on the outlet\u2019s revived website. She announced the paper was returning, bought by a new nonprofit of local investors. That former owner? Block Communications.<\/p>\n When Block announced its sale of the Post-Gazette last week, it was also to a nonprofit \u2014 the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which publishes the digital success story The Baltimore Banner. Many in Pittsburgh feared it would be sold to a hedge fund notorious for stripping newspapers of resources.<\/p>\n Does that make Block, long seen as a villain in the local journalism industry, a hero in this story?<\/p>\n \u201cFor better or worse, the Blocks will never get credit for that,\u201d said Andrew Conte, a journalism professor at Point Park University who runs Pittsburgh\u2019s Center for Media Innovation. \u201cBut it does seem like they made an effort to come up with the best outcome they could as they were leaving Pittsburgh. They could have just walked away and said, \u2018You know, we\u2019re done.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now the work begins. The new owner\u2019s benefactor, hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr., has said that he plans to invest $30 million in both the Banner and Post-Gazette over the next five years. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is going to be one of the most closely-watched newspaper acquisitions in years,\u201d said Tim Franklin, founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. \u201cCan a money-losing newspaper with serious labor strife be saved and resurrected as a non-profit? If Stewart Bainum and his team pull this off \u2014 and I hope they do \u2014 it could be a model for the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n Anticipating a Pittsburgh without the Post-Gazette, other news sources in the city had begun making plans to fill gaps in the marketplace, and they\u2019re not necessarily changing them because of the sale.<\/p>\n Another area newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review<\/a>, will reinstate a Sunday print edition in Pittsburgh on May 9 and will add about a dozen new journalists, said Jennifer Bertetto, its CEO.<\/p>\n Stockton\u2019s Public Source, launched in 2011 primarily as a home for investigative news stories, is widening its outlook. The outlet has also convened town halls over the past few months for residents to talk about what they want in local news, and published a list of 40 to 50 small news outlets in the region that focus on subject areas like the arts and business, or different neighborhoods and towns.<\/p>\n People less engaged in news were looking for new ideas. \u201cPeople are actively interested in where they get their information and who they can trust for it,\u201d Stockton said. \u201cSo we\u2019re leaning into that.\u201d<\/p>\n With their careers in limbo the past several months, Post-Gazette content editor Erin Hebert and photographer Steve Mellon were among several journalists meeting regularly as the Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting, or PAPER, seeing if they could create a digital news site. Those plans are up in the air.<\/p>\n Conte can walk a few blocks from the university to show office space set aside for journalists from small, local publications. He hopes to convince the Tribune-Review to print a periodic insert featuring the best reporting from these outlets. Conte, a former Trib reporter, recalled his old paper’s bitter competition with the Post-Gazette.<\/p>\n \u201cLiterally, they were trying to kill each other,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think any of us want to go back to a point where we\u2019re doing that. We\u2019ve evolved. We\u2019re trying to work together. Even if we\u2019re competing for scoops and clicks and dollars, there\u2019s also a benefit to having us get around the same table once a month.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http:\/\/x.com\/dbauder<\/a> and https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/dbauder.bsky.social<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PITTSBURGH (AP) \u2014 In the space of a couple of weeks this spring, Pittsburgh media has lived through a near-death experience and a resurrection. Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week announced the newspaper\u2019s sale to a nonprofit foundation that said it was committed to keeping it open. A news outlet that predates the U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":521,"featured_media":8121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"guid":"8f9fe3c6-feb5-4287-96ee-a8b710f11581","source":"The Associated Press","byline":"David Bauder","published":"2026-04-20 21:13:14","updated":"2026-04-20 21:13:14","_infotelid":"","_prepressid":"","_multisite_post_sync":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[596,1847,1737,1848,1849],"tags":[],"region":[],"class_list":["post-8120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-entertainment","category-international","category-manufacturing","category-media"],"blocksy_meta":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/infonews.ca\/inhome\/news\/8120\/facing-the-death-of-its-dominant-newspaper-pittsburgh-media-has-surprising-turnaround\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Facing the death of its dominant newspaper, Pittsburgh media has surprising turnaround","url":"http:\/\/infonews.ca\/inhome\/news\/8120\/facing-the-death-of-its-dominant-newspaper-pittsburgh-media-has-surprising-turnaround\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/infonews.ca\/inhome\/news\/8120\/facing-the-death-of-its-dominant-newspaper-pittsburgh-media-has-surprising-turnaround\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/infonews.ca\/inhome\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/inhome-7e79755598cdef045e195c7d3cd94c5d2477b08bececbb073e06503c5ec96911.jpg?w=150&h=150&crop=1","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/infonews.ca\/inhome\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/inhome-7e79755598cdef045e195c7d3cd94c5d2477b08bececbb073e06503c5ec96911.jpg"},"articleSection":"business","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"The Associated Press"}],"creator":["The Associated Press"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"iNhome","logo":""},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2026-04-21T04:13:14Z","datePublished":"2026-04-21T04:13:14Z","dateModified":"2026-04-21T04:13:14Z"},"rendered":"