PITTSBURGH (AP) — The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s owners announced Jan. 7 that the newspaper would shut down in a few months.
Citing financial losses, Block Communications Inc. announced it would cease publication on May 3. The newspaper is printed on Thursdays and Sundays and says on its website that average paid circulation is 83,000.
A couple of dozen union members returned to work at the Post-Gazette in November after a three-year strike.
More than five years ago, the newspaper declared it had reached a bargaining impasse with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and unilaterally imposed terms and conditions of employment on those workers. The newspaper was later found to have bargained in bad faith by making offers that were not intended to help reach a deal and by declaring an impasse prematurely.
The announcement that Block was shutting it down came on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court declined the PG Publishing Co. Inc.’s emergency appeal to halt a National Labor Relations Board order that forced it to abide by health-care coverage policies in an expired union contract.
Andrew Goldstein, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, said the newspaper’s journalists have a long history of award-winning work.
“Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists and the city of Pittsburgh,” Goldstein said. The union said employees were notified in a video on Zoom in which company officials did not speak live.
The Post-Gazette said Block Communications has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over two decades in operating the newspaper, and the company said it deemed “continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.”
The Block family said in a statement it was “proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century.”
A phone message seeking comment was left Wednesday at Block Communications headquarters in Toledo, Ohio.
The newspaper traces its roots to 1786, when the Pittsburgh Gazette began as a four-page weekly, and became a leading advocate for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. It went through a series of mastheads and owners until 1927, when Paul Block obtained the paper and named it the Post-Gazette.
The Free Speech Center newsletter offers a digest of First Amendment and news-media news every other week. Subscribe for free here: https://bit.ly/3kG9uiJ