Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was born on the western frontier of a new nation, when the Allegheny Mountains still marked the edge of the known American world. On the 29th of July 1786, a four-page weekly called The Pittsburgh Gazette rolled off the press, the first newspaper published west of those mountains. Its founders, Joseph Hall and John Scull, got there with encouragement from Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and one of their first major acts was to print the newly adopted Constitution of the United States for readers who had little other way of seeing it.

  Two and a half centuries later, on the 7th of January 2026, Block Communications announced that the paper would publish its final edition and cease operations on the 3rd of May. What happened in between is the story of a newspaper that outlasted wars, strikes, consolidations, and the slow collapse of print media itself, only to find that survival sometimes demands an entirely different form.

• 2. A Paper Built on Rivals

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  The Pittsburgh Post first appeared on the 10th of September 1842, under the name Daily Morning Post. Its roots lay in three pro-Democratic weeklies, the Mercury, the Allegheny Democrat, and the American Manufacturer, which had spent years fighting bitter editorial battles with the Gazette. The Gazette at the time leaned Whig, then Republican; the Post leaned Democratic. The two papers were political opposites, and a merger between them would have seemed almost absurd.

  But the 1920s brought relentless consolidation to Pittsburgh's newspaper market. In 1923, local publishers banded together to acquire and close the Dispatch and Leader. Then William Randolph Hearst and publisher Paul Block began negotiating. Block arranged to buy the morning Post and its evening sister, the Sun, then swapped the Sun to Hearst in exchange for the morning Gazette Times. With both morning papers in hand, Block combined them to form the Post-Gazette. Hearst took the evening papers and created the Sun-Telegraph. Both new organizations debuted on the 2nd of August 1927.

  By the time this new paper was born, the Gazette itself had already lived many lives. Under editor Neville B. Craig, from 1829 to 1841, it had championed the Anti-Masonic movement and become the city's first daily paper, publishing every afternoon except Sunday starting on the 30th of July 1833. In the 1850s it was credited with helping to organize a local chapter of the Republican Party and with contributing to Abraham Lincoln's election. The paper had been one of the first to suggest that tensions between North and South would erupt in war.

• 3. Joint Operations and the Press

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  By 1960, Pittsburgh supported three daily papers. The Post-Gazette ran in the morning; the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph published in the evening and on Sunday. The Post-Gazette bought the Sun-Telegraph that year and moved into its Grant Street offices, though staff apparently considered the building a hated "Sun-Telly barn."

  Attempts to launch a Sunday edition to compete with the Press proved unprofitable. In November 1961, the Post-Gazette entered a joint operating agreement with the Pittsburgh Press Company. The two papers kept their own news and editorial departments separate, but pooled production, distribution, and advertising sales. This arrangement moved the Post-Gazette into the Press building, constructed in 1927 and expanded with a curtain wall in 1962, where it would remain for more than 50 years, until 2015.

  The arrangement held for more than three decades, until the 17th of May 1992, when a strike shut down the Press. Because the two papers shared operations under their agreement, the Post-Gazette also ceased to publish. During the strike, Scripps Howard sold the Press to the Block family, owners of the Post-Gazette. The Blocks did not restart the Press when the labor dispute ended. Instead, the Post-Gazette absorbed it, publishing under the full masthead name Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sun-Telegraph/The Pittsburgh Press. Crucially, the Blocks did not use the moment to address the labor costs that had made the Press untenable. That decision would generate financial pressure for years.

• 4. Pulitzer Prizes and Recognition

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  Ray Sprigle won the Post-Gazette a Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1938 for revealing that Hugo Black, a newly appointed Supreme Court Justice, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The paper's next Pulitzer came 60 years later, in 1998, when staff photographer Martha Rial won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for her photographs of Rwandan and Burundian refugees.

  Photographer John Kaplan had won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for a series of photo essays on 21-year-olds published across several Block Newspapers papers, though that award cited the Block Newspapers group rather than the Post-Gazette specifically. Photographer Morris Berman believed the paper had narrowly missed a Pulitzer in 1964. He maintained that had the paper run his photograph of Y. A. Tittle, taken at Pitt Stadium, it would have won. That image went on to hang in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and appeared on the back cover of Tittle's autobiography, then in a Miller Beer High-Life commercial in 2005.

  The 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting went to the Post-Gazette for its coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Judges praised the paper for its "immersive, compassionate coverage." That same year, Bill Moushey's earlier investigation into the Federal Witness Protection Program, which had won the National Press Club's Freedom of Information Award in 1997, demonstrated the paper's long tradition of accountability work. The Post-Gazette also won the Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council in 2017 for religion editor Peter Smith's work, Silent Sanctuaries.

• 5. Shifting Editorial Ground

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  For most of its existence, the Post-Gazette held a liberal editorial stance. The paper had not endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972. Then, across the 2010s, the editorial tone shifted.

  The pivot accelerated in 2018, when the paper consolidated its editorial pages with those of The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, a longtime sister newspaper. Keith Burris, The Blade's editorial page editor and a frequent defender of Donald Trump, took over direction of both editorial pages. Burris added the title of executive editor of the Post-Gazette in 2019. In 2020, the Post-Gazette endorsed Trump's reelection bid, the first Republican presidential endorsement the paper had made in 48 years.

  The shift had a concrete human cost before the endorsement arrived. In June 2018, the paper fired Rob Rogers, its editorial cartoonist of 25 years. Rogers had joined the paper in 1993 and worked under four supervising editors. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists stated plainly: "Rogers was fired for refusing to do cartoons extolling Trump." Rogers himself wrote in The New York Times that the paper's new management had labeled his Trump-critical cartoons "too angry." Under a new supervisor, he had 19 cartoons or cartoon ideas killed in the first six months of 2018 alone, compared to an average of two to three rejections per year under previous editors. The paper denied the firing was political. Pittsburgh mayor William Peduto called it "disappointing" and said it sent "the wrong message about press freedoms."

  Four months after Rogers' dismissal, the paper hired conservative cartoonist Steve Kelley as his replacement. Rogers, working as a freelancer through Andrews McMeel Syndication, was named a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning, with the committee citing his "provocative illustrations that channeled cultural and historical references with expert artistry and an eye for hypocrisy and injustice."

• 6. Financial Decline and Strike

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  When John Craig handed editorial control to David Shribman in 2003, Craig told him the paper was in terrible financial shape. Shribman, noting the timing around Hanukkah, quipped: "It seemed there was only enough oil in this newspaper to keep the light on for one year." In September 2006, the paper formally disclosed that it had not been profitable since printing resumed in 1993.

  The paper's response was to shrink. In August 2018 it ended daily print publication. It cut down further in October 2019, then again in March 2021 when it eliminated the Friday print edition, leaving Thursday and Sunday as the only print days. Daily print editions that had once covered the city now cost $4 on Thursdays and $6 on Sundays and Thanksgiving, with higher prices outside Pennsylvania.

  On the 6th of October 2022, advertising, distribution, and production workers went on strike. The newsroom workers joined on the 18th of October. The National Labor Relations Board pursued a case charging the paper with unfair labor practices. In April 2024, the NLRB authorized a request from the unions to seek a temporary injunction against the Post-Gazette ownership for violating workers' labor rights. The striking workers launched their own online publication, the Pittsburgh Union Progress, to keep reporting through the dispute.

  In November 2025, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a finding that PG Publishing had violated federal labor law by negotiating in bad faith, and upheld the remedy requiring compensation for workers' lost earnings and benefits, plus interest. The strike ended on the 24th of November 2025, after three years. The Pittsburgh Union Progress closed the day before, on the 23rd.

• 7. Closure and Acquisition

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  On the 7th of January 2026, Block Communications cited the November 2025 court judgment and announced that the Post-Gazette would publish its final edition and cease operations on the 3rd of May 2026.

  The Baltimore-based nonprofit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, publishers of The Baltimore Banner, reached an agreement to acquire the paper's assets effective the 4th of May. The Venetoulis Institute was chosen by the Block Communications board over higher bidders, including Alden Global Capital. Bob Cohn, president and CEO of the Venetoulis Institute, said he planned to rehire "a large number" of those employed at the Post-Gazette, which would be reconstituted as a nonprofit with editorial decisions remaining local. As a nonprofit, the paper would no longer be able to endorse or oppose candidates for office.

  Ownership transferred on the 1st of May 2026. Half of the newsroom's staff was laid off, including longtime music reporter Scott Mervis. President Tracey DeAngelo and executive editor Stan Wischnowski were retained. The purchase price was not disclosed. What began as a four-page weekly in 1786 will continue, in some form, under nonprofit stewardship, the first time in its history that profit has been removed from its operating equation entirely.