The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the newspaper of record in my hometown, announced last week that it will cease operations in May. The Block family, which owns the Post-Gazette and the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, are in a yearslong battle with the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild, the paper’s union, and a court recently ordered them to reinstate the conditions of a 2014 labor agreement. In response, the Blocks said the Post-Gazette has lost more than $350 million over the past two decades and said they can’t find a path to profitability under the old labor rules.

The problems with the Post-Gazette have been many — I’ll get to some of them below — but its staff routinely produced work worth reading. In 2018, to cite one major example, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for what the award committee called its “immersive, compassionate coverage of the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue that captured the anguish and resilience of a community thrust into grief.”

But there are smaller moments I will remember. During a spasm of violence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Post-Gazette chronicled the murders of some of my high school classmates and neighborhood friends. The Post-Gazette also wrote a story about that awful time my grandmother, who was standing in front of a window in her senior housing apartment, was struck by a wayward bullet and miraculously survived with only minor injuries.

This is what a local newspaper does: It puts names and faces to statistics. It publishes stories about events that some people will never forget alongside stories that nobody but those involved may remember. But according to a 2025 report from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, between 2005 and 2025, “Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers” vanished, “leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news.” Between its 2024 report and its 2025 report, more than 130 newspapers shut down, the initiative reported.

Assuming the Blocks mean what they say and aren’t playing a game of chicken with the union, the end of the Post-Gazette would mean the disappearance of the largest news organ in Pennsylvania’s second-largest metro area. Since 2018, Pittsburgh had been the country’s largest city without a printed daily newspaper, but then the Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed its final edition on Dec. 31, after 157 years of continuous publication. So that means Atlanta now holds that distinction. The AJC will continue online, but, according to the Blocks’ announcement, Pittsburgh won’t even have that. It will be without any iteration of what used to be its daily paper of record.

And there are so many big stories brewing in the city. The Steelers might have a new head coach soon if there’s truth to the speculation that Mike Tomlin might leave after 19 years in that position. In April, the city will host a projected half-million visitors for the NFL draft, billed as the largest sporting event ever for a town that regularly sells out a 70,000-seat football stadium. The NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins were just sold to the Chicago-based Hoffman Family of Companies for a reported $1.7 billion.

And that’s just sports. The city’s long-delayed and largest urban development project is still in flux after the Penguins’ former owners last year allowed their development rights to lapse, sending local officials back to square one. And around the time the Blocks say the Post-Gazette will shut down, Pittsburgh’s new mayor, the third mayor since 2021, will be about halfway through his first year on the job. He’ll have to implement a 20% property tax increase recently approved by city council in hopes of avoiding a fiscal crisis.

With the city’s major institutions seemingly all in a state of transition and the nation convulsing with immigration raids, tariffs, mass layoffs and military action, the timing of this announcement is bad. Granted, there is no good time to lose a metropolitan daily.

While the harm of losing a newsroom of journalists who cover daily life, sports fanaticism and provide government accountability in a region of about 2.3 million people might seem obvious, such a loss in Pittsburgh is even more grievous than has been captured in various obituaries for the Post-Gazette.

Unlike most major cities, Pittsburgh functions more like a small town. Its 90 hilly neighborhoods are tight-knit yet deeply segregated. The quality-of-life disparities between the races are what pushed me toward a journalism career. When the Post-Gazette first reported on a 2019 University of Pittsburgh study that concluded that the city produced the worst quality of living for the city’s Black population of any American city its size, it was less revelation than affirmation.

As a journalist who’d covered business and sports in other cities, it was a dream of sorts to do so in my hometown, but the disappointment I felt at never getting to work at the P-G was mitigated by the Post-Gazette’s reputation as a tough place for Black journalists to work. The National Association of Black Journalists, where I served as a board member between 2009 and 2015, gave the paper its 2020 Thumbs Down Award for, NABJ wrote, “unfairly prohibiting two Black journalists from covering protests in the city following the death of George Floyd.”

Though the newspaper cited a tweet comparing the way the streets looked after George Floyd protests and after a country music concert to claim a Black reporter was unfairly biased, a white reporter who had posted a disparaging tweet about a man accused of looting wasn’t immediately pulled from covering protests. That only happened after the newspaper guild questioned the disparate responses. The PG is also the newspaper that published a 2018 editorial following Donald Trump’s infamous remark calling Black nations “sh-thole countries” that began, “Calling someone a racist is the new McCarthyism.”

Then there’s the decision by the owners to lurch to the right and pick a fight with organized labor while running a shrinking enterprise in a deep blue city that was literally built by unionized steelworkers.

But the PG was far from the country’s only newspaper to be dinged by its history with race in the newsroom or in coverage, and like many others, it did some noteworthy reporting despite its problems. All of our cities and towns are worse off when there aren’t any newspaper reporters spread across multiple beats.

It’s likely that when Pittsburgh’s next major tragedy or calamity comes, it won’t have its most important newspaper to sort out the facts. That’s sad. The Post-Gazette was far from perfect, but it didn’t just belong to the Blocks. It was Pittsburgh’s, and my city will be immensely poorer without it.
 

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