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.
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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.
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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.
