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It was a miraculous save. After a three-year strike, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had been fated to close on May 3, as its publisher, Block Communications, had informed staff via prerecorded Zoom video. Then, weeks before doomsday, it was announced that the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism would be taking over, giving the Post-Gazette another shot. In 2022 the Venetoulis Institute, a nonprofit organization founded by Stewart Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate, established the Baltimore Banner, which has since grown into a robust newsroom and won a Pulitzer Prize. Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, the president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, was cautiously optimistic.
But by Friday, Goldstein, along with about 40 percent of the Post-Gazette’s staff—which had been roughly a hundred and twenty people—was told there would not be a job for him. Goldstein, an education reporter, had started at the Post-Gazette in 2014, as a twenty-one-year-old intern. “I grew up in that newsroom,” he said. “I would sacrifice my job for everyone else’s if I possibly could, and I know that’s not the way the world works, but truly my sorrow in this is for the many talented journalists and great people and great friends of mine who are really suffering right now.”
In the weeks ahead of the takeover, the Venetoulis Institute sent an email to employees inviting them to “explore opportunities with us as we build the future Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.” The message offered them a chance to speak with incoming leadership at the Fairmont hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. “When we had our little twenty-minute interviews—the strikers among the guild and especially the union officers—I know for a fact that we were all very composed, and really tried our best to make sure that people at Venetoulis knew that we weren’t trying to cause trouble,” Erin Hebert, a Post-Gazette copy editor and vice president of the union, told me.
Hebert’s meeting had been with Bob Cohn, the president and chief executive of the Venetoulis Institute. As he explained it to me, since the Post-Gazette was an asset purchase, it wasn’t so much about deciding whom to cut as starting “with an empty newsroom and filling it with journalists.” Last Wednesday, staffers began receiving offer letters for salaried positions, which included a forty-eight-hour deadline to respond. They were asked to keep the terms of the job offers confidential.
The next day, another set of emails went out. (Subject line: “A note from the Venetoulis Institute.”) “As you know, this is a difficult time for local journalism, and the Post-Gazette has not been immune from the headwinds battering the industry,” the message went. “The newsroom in the new iteration will be smaller at the outset, which has forced us to make very hard decisions. We regret that we cannot offer you a role at this time.” Based on the union’s estimates, 80 percent of those on the Post-Gazette staff who had been on strike received the bad news. Of seven guild officers at the paper, a representative for the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh said that one was offered a job. Of at least thirty-one who had not been on strike and who were offered positions, the representative said, twenty-five had signed a letter in January calling for new elections for union leadership, saying their views were not being represented.
Cohn told me that hiring decisions were not based on anyone’s union status or strike history. “We are building a newsroom that we think will be best poised to bring the Post-Gazette to sustainability while doing excellent journalism,” he said. The hiring process is ongoing, he noted; he declined to share how many people the newsroom is looking to recruit, but said that at this point, they are recruiting from within the Post-Gazette.
“It’s a kind of reckoning that that probably is going to be the best result that could have happened out of this,” Ken Doctor, the founder of LookOut Local, a network of local news outlets, told me. “It’s a major reduction. But if you compare it to what is working across the country and what might work with the intention of reviving this and then rebuilding it, it makes both economic sense to me, but sense for the community as well.”
From the start of the Venetoulis Institute, Cohn said, the organization has wanted to build a model replicable beyond Baltimore. “Our posture going into this year is: We’re making some progress in Maryland, and we will, with patience, look to see whether there might be other places where we can bring this,” he said. “And then on January 7, it was announced that the Post-Gazette would be shutting down in a few months’ time. And this is a newspaper that has been around for two hundred and forty years, the leading source of news in Western Pennsylvania. So we basically accelerated our plans to someday bring the Banner model elsewhere, and decided to do it more quickly.”
The Venetoulis Institute will not be responsible for the debts owed to staffers per the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which in November ruled that management of the Post-Gazette had been bargaining in bad faith and must offer compensation for its workers’-rights violations. Block Communications is continuing to hash that out in court.
“I don’t know how the Post-Gazette is going to cover a city the size of Pittsburgh, effectively, with half the staff,” Goldstein said. He and Hebert, along with other ex-Post-Gazette staffers and strikers, will now be focused on the Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting, known as PAPER, which they created in January, when the Block family announced the paper’s closure. The PAPER gang is exploring how to start their own newsroom. “We are still probably months away,” he said. “But if you look around the country, there are news cooperatives out there of various sizes. I’ve seen us do the impossible before, and I know we can do it again.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of a name.
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