After its dominant newspaper is saved, Pittsburgh’s media looks ahead

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’s sale 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’s largest community without a city-based paper.

Weeks earlier, the alternative Pittsburgh City Paper, whose staff learned on New Year’s Day that it was closing after 34 years, roared back to life under new ownership.

These developments represent rare positive news for a local journalism industry that has seen widespread decline over the past two decades – with newsrooms shuttered or thinned out, journalists thrown out of work, and consumers drifting away. While no one is pretending that a true turnaround will be easy in Pittsburgh, the city’s brush with a news desert may have sparked renewed appreciation for local journalism.

“It’s human nature that sometimes you have to be shaken a bit to realize what’s important in your life,” said Halle Stockton, co-executive director and editor-in-chief of the digital news outlet Public Source.

The Pittsburgh Gazette was born on July 29, 1786, as the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. It went through several names with the expansion and contraction of a newspaper market that once supported seven publications at the beginning of the 20th century. A consolidation following the closure of the Pittsburgh Post in 1927 created the Post-Gazette, a name that has remained for 99 years.

The Post-Gazette established a solid journalistic reputation, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. “The Post-Gazette is really the paper of record for this city,” said Kevin Acklin, chief of staff to a former Pittsburgh mayor and former president of the Penguins hockey team. The city’s other longtime “paper of record,” The Pittsburgh Press, closed in 1992 after a Teamsters Union strike.

Labor issues also plagued the Post-Gazette’s final years under Block Communications, Inc. Much of the staff was on strike between 2022 and 2025, though the newspaper continued publishing. Block announced the closing on the same January day that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected its appeal of a ruling on health benefits seen as favorable to former strikers.

Since then, speculation about the paper’s future intensified. Acklin worked with other investors this winter to purchase the newspaper, but negotiations fell through when Block insisted the union not be part of the deal.

A clue to the newspaper’s future emerged in mid-March when the Pittsburgh City Paper announced its revival. “You thought we were dead and gone, didn’t you?” wrote Ali Trachta, the paper’s top editor, on its revived website. “So did I. But, to be honest, only very briefly.”

A new nonprofit called Local Matters, led by a former engineering manager at Apple, had gathered investors to purchase the City Paper. The publication would return to monthly printed editions and launch a membership program for readers to pledge support, with most of its staff returning. Notably, the City Paper’s previous owner was also Block Communications.

When Block announced its sale of the Post-Gazette last week, the buyer was another nonprofit – the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which publishes the digital success story The Baltimore Banner. Block chose this buyer despite saying it was not the highest bidder, avoiding a feared sale to a hedge fund notorious for stripping newspapers of resources.

“For better or worse, the Blocks will never get credit for that,” said Andrew Conte, a journalism professor at Point Park University who runs Pittsburgh’s Center for Media Innovation. “But 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.”

Hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr., the Venetoulis Institute’s benefactor, plans to invest $30 million in both the Banner and Post-Gazette over the next five years. The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh hopes to be part of the rebuilding process, though their inclusion remains uncertain.

“This is going to be one of the most closely-watched newspaper acquisitions in years,” said Tim Franklin, founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. “Can 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 – and I hope they do – it could be a model for the nation.”

Other news organizations in Pittsburgh had already begun making plans to fill the void left by the Post-Gazette’s expected closure. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review will reinstate a Sunday print edition in Pittsburgh on May 9, after having stopped printing in the city a decade ago. The Trib is also adding about a dozen new journalists to enhance coverage of business, healthcare, transportation, and education.

Public Source, launched in 2011 primarily as a platform for investigative journalism, is broadening its scope. The outlet has hosted town halls for residents to discuss what they want from local news and compiled a list of 40 to 50 small news outlets in the region that focus on specific subject areas or geographic locations.

The greatest challenge for Pittsburgh’s evolving news ecosystem may be reconnecting with younger audiences. When Conte asks his journalism students how many checked the Post-Gazette’s website that morning, only a few tentatively raise their hands. Most get their news through social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

A recent Pew Research Center study underscores this problem, showing that public interest in local news has declined significantly. In 2016, 37% of Americans said they followed local news very closely, but by 2025, that figure had dropped to just 21%.

Conte believes this reinforces the need for news organizations to cooperate rather than engage in cutthroat competition. “Literally, they were trying to kill each other,” he said, recalling the fierce rivalry between the Tribune-Review and Post-Gazette in earlier days. “I don’t think any of us want to go back to a point where we’re doing that. We’ve evolved. We’re trying to work together.”