Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper?

Pittsburgh is the 28th-largest metropolitan area in the United States. It has a proud history as a center of industry and has transitioned into a major hub for medicine, robotics, and academia. It’s home to 10 Fortune 500 companies — more than 38 states can claim — and its big three pro sports teams have won 18 championships.

And soon it’ll be the largest American city without a real daily newspaper.

Today, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — “One of America’s Great Newspapers,” it has proclaimed on its front page for decades — announced it would be printing its final edition on May 3. But that’s not so it can boldly embrace the digital future — it’s to shut down completely.

Block Communications — the company that owns the newspaper and has been controlled for more than a century by the Block family — said it had lost more than $350 million running the Post-Gazette over the past 20 years and “the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.” Why today? This morning, the Supreme Court denied, without comment, the newspaper’s appeal of a federal court ruling that found it had improperly violated the terms of its main union contract by making cuts to workers’ health care plans (among other things) in 2020. Those cuts then sparked the first newspaper strike of the 21st century, which lasted more than 1,000 days.

The strike was incredibly divisive; the initial NewsGuild vote to strike only passed 38–36, and a majority of the newsroom remained at work. But after a series of rulings in the union’s favor, a November court order finally ended the strike and sent the remaining strikers back to work. The Blocks today said the court ruling “would require the Post-Gazette to operate under a 2014 labor contract that imposes…outdated and inflexible operational practices unsuited for today’s local journalism.”

The loss of the Post-Gazette would be awful; it’s an above-average metro daily that has done a lot of good work. While there are debates to be had about what it means to be a “city without a newspaper,”¹ the largest thus far is probably Youngstown, Ohio — another Rust Belt burg just across the Ohio line. But metro Pittsburgh’s almost six times the size of metro Youngstown — this would be a new scale of loss.

This is a sad day, but there’s some important context here. The Block family has been riven by division for decades. Long ago, I had a front-row seat: John Robinson Block, the P-G’s editor-in-chief for the past 32 years, offered me my first job in journalism at the family’s other paper, the Toledo Blade, and I got to know the two major branches of the family over the next few years. The relationships between John (who ran editorial), his twin brother Allan (who ran the business side), and their cousins (the descendants of Pittsburgh legend William Block Sr.) were poisonous back then, when newspapers were still reliable producers of profit. They didn’t improve with age and the industry’s decline. Two years ago, it got to the point of one twin suing the other and the board firing Allan before a settlement brought him back.

John and Allan have each had their moments in the spotlight in recent years. There’s the time John showed up in the newsroom one night (allegedly) drunk and (certainly) in a rage and started screaming at his 12-year-old daughter. Or the time Allan’s wife called Kamala Harris a “whore” and rooted on the rioters on January 6, 2021. Both John and Allan have moved further to the Trumpist right in recent years, leading to some embarrassingly racist content and a rare Trump endorsement from a major newspaper. And John often viewed his newsrooms as his personal fiefdoms, ordering up stories when his trash didn’t get picked up or he’d suffered some perceived slight. “Erratic” has been their main descriptor for a long time. (Note that none of the Blocks are actually quoted in today’s closure announcement — evidence, I’d suspect, of how unstable family relationships have gotten.)

Here’s the deal: Pittsburgh is a city with an unusually robust philanthropic community. Baronial names like Mellon, Carnegie, and Heinz have endowed foundations and institutions at a scale few cities its size can match. But I know there’s been hesitation about investing resources into local journalism as long as John and Allan were in charge of the local daily. Partnering with the Post-Gazette meant being subject to their whims; starting up a competing outlet risked damaging what still was, in many ways, an above-average local news operation.

(By the way, I completely believe the Blocks when they say they’ve lost $350 million running the Post-Gazette. For decades, their newspapers paid significantly higher-than-average salaries, thanks to strong union contracts. In 1999, when I was in Toledo, the Post-Gazette had the fourth-highest minimum reporter salary in the country, behind only The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the dailies in Honolulu, where everything is expensive. The Blade had a full-time London bureau until 1983; hell, it sent me to the South Pacific for three weeks for a feature story. For years, the Blocks’ primary source of cashflow has been a separate broadband company; just a week ago, they shut down the Pittsburgh alt-weekly they also owned.)

So Pittsburgh has been kind of stuck. There’s pent-up capacity for something like the Lenfest Institute-era Philadelphia Inquirer or The Baltimore Banner — either a nonprofit conversion of the local daily or a robust competitor/replacement for it. But Block family drama — along with the neverending strike — complicated things enough to prevent much action.

Back in the 20th century, when newspapers closed, it was usually sudden. Companies losing a lot of money usually want to stop losing it — now. The fact that the Post-Gazette announced a closure date that’s still five months off means there’ll be time for some combination of Pittsburgh’s foundations, universities, and institutions to react. Maybe that looks like the Blocks donating the Post-Gazette to a nonprofit that carries on with a decent-sized newsroom — a version of what the Salt Lake Tribune has done. Maybe it means starting a replacement that can take in some share of the P-G’s journalists. Maybe it’s a partnership with Lenfest, which has experience running a newspaper as a nonprofit, as well as some reach across the state.

I don’t know what the Post-Gazette’s new form will look like — or even if it’ll be called the Post-Gazette. But I suspect Pittsburgh won’t be completely without “the first newspaper west of the Alleghenies” come May. They might just be without an owner that — despite decades of very real support for journalism — has passed its expiration date.

Here’s the paper’s full press release:

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Post-Gazette to Publish Final Edition and Cease Operations May 3, 2026

Block Communications, Inc. and the Block family are saddened to announce that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette plans to publish its final edition and cease operations on May 3, 2026.

Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette. Despite those efforts, the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.

Recent court decisions would require the Post-Gazette to operate under a 2014 labor contract that imposes on the Post-Gazette outdated and inflexible operational practices unsuited for today’s local journalism.

We deeply regret the impact this decision will have on Pittsburgh and the surrounding region. The Block family is proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century and will exit with their dignity intact.

1. For example, there’s another newspaper based in the suburbs called The Tribune-Review that once tried to “invade” the city and become a Post-Gazette competitor. But it stopped publishing the “Pittsburgh Tribune-Review” back in 2016, and even if it slaps “Pittsburgh” back on the front page, I wouldn’t count it. And of course, some other cities no longer have a print newspaper — most recently, Atlanta — but they still have robust digital-only newsrooms.