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In late July, the Pittsburgh Progress, a news cooperative founded by former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists, made its long-awaited debut. “We want to write and report on what we think is important to our community,” Erin Hébert, one of the Progress’s eighteen founding members, told me. The initial slate of stories captures that ethos: a report on staffing shortages of union nurses and lactation consultants at a local hospital, a look at the city’s queer-owned businesses, a profile of a local football coach and his team, and a review of the book American Made: Stories of Work from the WPA.

To fund its operations, the Progress is relying on advertisers, paid subscribers, investors—including labor unions—and “reader-members.” Progress supporters can attain this status by paying a one-time fee of ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. Separately, they can sign up for a monthly subscription for nine ninety-nine. Individuals can also buy a limited number of preferred shares of the publication. (The Progress team is still finalizing the details but expect this will be around two hundred and fifty dollars per share.) The team is applying for funding through the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, a program that invests federal dollars alongside private-sector capital to help promote economic revitalization and community development.

Expenses for the Progress include an interim business manager, legal fees, website development and maintenance costs, and contractors to help with social media and audience engagement. The articles have largely been produced for free. Most of the writers for the site, many of whom were founding members, chose to forgo an established freelance rate of two hundred and fifty dollars per article, electing instead to be paid once the publication was on surer financial footing. For their personal bills, the team has been drawing on severance payouts from the Post-Gazette and other part-time gigs. 

Ownership of the Progress is divided between workers and the reader-members, with a majority of the seats on the publication’s board going to workers. Reader-members may have input on the direction of the publication and can sit on an elected board, but the journalists retain all editorial decision-making power. 

By the time of the hard launch, slated for the fall, the Progress aims to have raised enough money to cover six months of operating expenses. (The team declined to say what that target is.) Depending on how much they raise, they hope to hire between six and eight full-time staffers, including a managing editor and business director, and to maintain a substantial freelance budget. They also intend to publish more regularly.

The goal is to center the voices of Pittsburgh citizens, as opposed to powerful institutions. “We’re accountable to our readers and to ourselves, not to the business interests of owners,” Natalie Dubela, a founding member, told me. The Progress team has held town halls to ask the community what it wants to see covered; some hundred and fifty people have attended, Dubela estimated. “What people told us is that there’s neighborhoods that feel underrepresented or misrepresented,” she said. “Like, ‘Our neighborhood is only covered when there’s violent crime. And it gives the wrong impression of our neighborhood.’” 

Andrew Goldstein, the president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and a former reporter at the Post-Gazette, told me that during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, people in the city sometimes refused to talk to the newspaper. He attributed this, in part, to the editorial board’s endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and the decision to move a Black reporter off the protest beat. “When they would see us wearing a Post-Gazette badge or we introduced ourselves as so-and-so from the PG, it sometimes got awkward pretty quickly,” Goldstein said. 

The same people were often more willing to speak with the same reporters during a three-year strike at the Post-Gazette, during which many were organizing or writing for the Pittsburgh Union Progress, their strike publication. “We saw, through the strike, that there are communities that feel very alienated by mainstream media,” Goldstein, who participated in the strike, told me. 

The eventual founders of the Progress began exploring alternatives to the Post-Gazette in January, when its owners announced plans to shutter the publication. Later, the Venetoulis Institute acquired the paper and reconfigured it as a smaller operation; many reporters, finding themselves out of a job, began making moves to start their own news cooperative, a model that gives workers direct control.

Max Rivlin-Nadler, a co-owner of Hell Gate, spoke with members of the Pittsburgh Progress team about how to start their newsroom. The Hell Gate team understood the mission—and that starting from square one on the business side posed challenges for worker-led publications. “This is exactly the type of news outlet that should be started in Pittsburgh—they’ve suffered a ton of loss of local media,” Rivlin-Nadler said. “They’re carrying the torch.” 

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