Barely two weeks before it was due to shut down, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Tuesday it had found a last-minute buyer — a nonprofit journalism operation that has agreed to keep the struggling newspaper open.
The resolution to a months-long worry in western Pennsylvania about the paper’s shutdown comes at a difficult moment for the American newspaper industry, which has shed jobs, resources and sometimes entire companies due to the upending of the traditional revenue model by the internet at the beginning of this century.
The Post-Gazette dates its ancestry to 1786, the first newspaper to open west of the Allegheny Mountains, and its closure would have left Pittsburgh as the nation’s largest community without a city-based paper.
Its owners, Block Communications, said the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which publishes the digital Baltimore Banner, had agreed to buy its assets. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Post-Gazette said the new owners would continue to print the newspaper on two days, Thursday and Sunday, and would operate a website on the other days.
The newspaper had been due to close on May 3.
“We are committed to working with exceptional journalists, along with civic and business leaders across the region, to build a new future for local journalism in Western Pennsylvania,” said Bob Cohn, CEO of the Venetoulis Institute. “We are clear-eyed about the task ahead. We have learned in Maryland that this work takes time, discipline and investment.”
The institute, which opened the Banner in 2022, said it has appointed David Shribman, who was executive editor of the Post-Gazette from 2003 to 2019, to its board of directors.
The Post-Gazette won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 under Shribman, but it has been mired in labor strife in recent years.
Block Communications announced in January that it would shut down the newspaper, on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal of a lawsuit regarding health benefits to formerly striking workers.
The Banner, despite being so young, has also won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. In a difficult time for the news business, the Banner has grown to have 79,500 paid subscribers.
Both Block and Venetoulis described their deal as reflecting “a shared commitment to sustaining local journalism in Pittsburgh.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.