Block Family announces Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is closing in May after 240 years
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will distribute its last issue May 3 and close after 240 years of covering news in the Steel City.
Block Communications, which owns the Post-Gazette and Toledo (Ohio) Blade, announced Wednesday, Jan. 7, it is closing the newspaper, citing mounting financial losses it said eclipsed $350 million in the last 20 years.
“Continued cash losses at this scale (is) no longer sustainable,” according to a statement on the Post-Gazette’s website.
The announcement came mere hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn a lower court order in November requiring the company to return to the bargaining table after a three-year strike and negotiate a new contract with its union. The court decision required the Block family, which owns the paper, and union to operate under a 2014 labor contract, which had expired and later resulted in the newsroom strike, until a new collectively bargained contract could be signed.
The decision also comes a week after the Pittsburgh City Paper closed its doors after 34 years. The City Paper is also owned by Block Communications.
The Block family has owned the Post-Gazette since 1927, when Paul Block made a deal with William Randolph Hearst that led to Block getting the Pittsburgh Post and the Gazette Times to combine them into a morning paper called the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The Pittsburgh Gazette, a predecessor, first published in 1786.
The print copies of the Post-Gazette have been printed by Eagle Media since 2022.
