Pittsburgh Workers Join Media Desert as Post-Gazette Owners Close Paper

Labor Landscape

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s planned closure will impact 171 workers, according to a WARN notice filed March 3 with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. 

The WARN Act, meaning Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification, is designed to protect workers, families and communities, according to the commonwealth.  Through the act, employers are mandated to give a 60-day notice before closing plants or conducting mass layoffs.  

“It’s a shame that the Block family did not know how to run a business,’’ said Mickey Huff, a distinguished director of the Park Center for Independent Media, Journalism at Ithaca College. “They are just letting the Post-Gazette die. They lost the legal battle but won’t admit they lost and now leave Pittsburgh in a media desert,’’ said Huff.  “Newspapers are not monetary play things,’’ Huff added. 

Post-Gazette staff found out on Jan.7 that the newspaper would cease to exist May 3. The news came after a yearlong labor dispute and strike involving the newspaper’s union, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and the Block family.  Workers – both those who had been part of a yearslong strike that ended last November and those who had crossed the picket line – learned of the impending closure through a prerecorded video at a virtual all-staff meeting.  

But union journalists from the soon-to-be-closed paper joined with labor leaders and community representatives earlier this year  to launch an entity organizers say will be dedicated to imaging a future for the paper beyond its current ownership.  

The organization, called Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting, or PAPER for short, seeks to look into possible models to continue reporting after the Block family, which owns the paper ceases publication.  

“We know how to fight. We’re not done fighting. We’re going to try and build something that does not rely on the blocks, whatever form it takes,” according to the union.   

However, there is media life after a paper dies.   “Online media is the way of the world now,’’ said Elizabeth Regan, editor of LymeLine, an independent, nonpartisan online news outlet serving 10,000 readers in the southeastern Connecticut towns of Lyme and old Lyme since 2003.  

Supported by donations and advertising , Regan said the online news vehicle provides trusted news, event listings and readers perspective unique to a place where the Connecticut River meets Long Island Sound.  “We are committed to telling the stories of those who live, work and play here – and empowering them to tell their own stories,’’ said Regan.   

The United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers in the past decade, and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs over the past two decades, leaving 50 million people in news deserts, areas where people have limited or no access to reliable local news sources.   

“This is why we are training tomorrow’s journalists to have multi-platform media skills,’’ said Pamela Walck, a journalism professor at Duquesne University.   “I do not think Pittsburgh is in a media desert because we have about 40 different publication centers,’ Walck said.  “Regardless of the medium, the journalist must be able to write and tell a compelling story,’’ Walck said.  

To that end, Walck said Duquesne University has joined with several other schools to host the Keystone News Summit April 15-17 at Hershey Lodge in Hershey, Pa.  

“We know that when we lose local papers, government corruption increases and civic participation decreases,’’ said Walck.  “We want to discuss ways to help independent news groups survive and find news way to deliver news,’’ she said.   

Ithaca’s Huff also compliments Walck’s notion by reporting that the loss of local newspapers leads to the abandonment of meaningful public-interest standards and the rise of platform monopolies with virtually no accountability.  

Share This Article: