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On Labor Day, about a dozen current and former journalists from The Blade marched in Toledo, Ohio’s annual parade. Representing the Toledo NewsGuild, they carried signs drawn in marker—“Quality Work Deserves Fair Pay” and “Union Town Union Newspaper”—and wore shirts with the slogan “The Blade Works Because We Do” spilling out of a typewriter. The next morning, Block Communications Inc. (BCI), The Blade’s parent company, announced that the paper would close on December 31. “The financial losses The Blade has endured for years are simply not sustainable,” the company’s COO wrote in an email to the union. BCI said it was exploring a possible sale of the paper’s assets. If Toledo loses its newspaper, the city will become one of the largest in the United States without a major print or digital outlet.
The Blade’s journalists, many of whom I worked alongside as the paper’s political writer from 2018 to 2021, had been bracing for this news since the summer, when management resumed labor negotiations with the NewsGuild. For nearly a decade, The Blade’s unionized newsroom has been working under an expired contract; longtime guild members hadn’t seen across-the-board contractual salary increases since the early 2000s. During my time at The Blade, BCI appeared set on prolonging labor talks indefinitely as it made cost-cutting moves, such as eliminating a majority of print days beginning in early 2019. Then, this July, The Blade proposed a two-year contract that would eliminate seniority and allow guild work to be outsourced to artificial intelligence or management, terms that many members feared would hasten the newsroom’s decline. Guild members told me the company also planned to lay off a third of its seventy-five-member bargaining unit, which includes members of the ad sales and circulation teams along with journalists.
The Blade has not said whether it has fielded any interest in the paper yet. “I’m not at liberty to talk about that now,” Allan Block, the CEO of BCI, told me when I asked about the closure during a brief phone call. “Maybe in the future, but it’s still an ongoing situation, and it should be reported after the conclusion,” he added, before hanging up. Bob Cohn, the CEO of the Venetoulis Institute, which also owns the Baltimore Banner and acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from BCI in the spring, suggested in a statement that Venetoulis was unlikely to buy The Blade. “We are diligently focused on meeting the needs of readers in Maryland and Western Pennsylvania through our journalism in the Baltimore Banner and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” he said.
During negotiations, BCI told NewsGuild members that the company wanted to reach a tentative contract agreement due to what it said were mounting financial losses. (BCI did not respond to a request for comment about negotiations or layoffs.) On August 28, Toledo NewsGuild members rejected the company’s contract offer in a 45–26 vote and prepared for the worst. “We were expecting it,” Alex Bracken, a general-assignment reporter who started at the paper last year, said. “You know, you get the email from management, and it’s like, ‘Oh, wow.’ I kind of sat there for a second. Then you start digging into details and it becomes real. I mean, there’s going to be a final newspaper.” The announcement hit some of the paper’s most veteran employees the hardest. “I’m not going to say it was inevitable, but it didn’t happen overnight, or for any single reason,” Tom Henry, The Blade’s environmental writer for the past thirty-three years, told me.
It had already been a rough year for the Blade newsroom. In March, the paper’s entire staff was forced to vacate their historic headquarters because of what appeared to be maintenance problems. The ceiling was leaky and missing tiles; an editor captured a video of a bat flying around the newsroom. (BCI never shared the reason for the building’s closure.) The newsroom transitioned to working from home. Contract negotiations took place at branches of the Toledo Public Library.
BCI was founded in 1900 by Paul Block, a German immigrant, initially as a media advertising firm. The company once owned publications in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Tennessee, along with a roster of TV stations, the last of which it sold to Gray Media for eighty million dollars in May (BCI still owns Buckeye Broadband, a major cable and broadband provider in Northwest Ohio). The Blade is nearly two hundred years old, and has been in the Block family for the past century. A privately held company, BCI is headed by the Block twins: Allan, the CEO, and John, The Blade’s editor in chief and publisher and vice-chair of the BCI board. In 2024, the brothers went to court over allegations that Allan made in a lawsuit against John and other family members, arguing they cut him out of discussions about selling the company; they resolved the suit amicably later that year. (Allan did not comment on the lawsuit. John did not respond to a request for comment.)
Relations between the Blocks and their rank-and-file employees have long been contentious. “I could care less about ‘saving The Blade,’” Susan, Allan’s wife, once commented on Facebook. “It’s way more trouble than it is worth.” In February of 2019, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists witnessed John in the newsroom, allegedly intoxicated, yelling at his twelve-year-old daughter and kicking and punching a sign reading “Shame on the Blocks!” At the time, Allan said the incident resulted from the “frustration over financial and other challenges in the newspaper industry,” leading “to an unfortunate exchange with employees.” In 2022, Nolan Rosenkrans, a former Toledo NewsGuild president, recorded an encounter with Allan at an Ohio rest stop, where he confronted him about the company’s labor practices; Block cursed at Rosenkrans and appeared to swing a bag of fast food at him. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the incident, which happened the day Post-Gazette union members demonstrated outside John’s wedding.
The brothers’ politics were another point of contention in the newsroom. During the 2016 presidential campaign, John and Keith Burris, The Blade’s editorial-page editor, met Donald Trump on his private plane, which the paper mentioned in its coverage of Trump’s Toledo stop. Four years later, the paper endorsed Trump for president. (It did not endorse any candidate in 2016 or 2024.) Allan, meanwhile, has contributed to a variety of Republican campaigns, including Trump’s.
In a 2022 interview with CJR, John insisted that relations with staff were never as bad as they appeared. “I get along great with the people who want to get along with me,” he said. “And in recent times, you know, some people don’t want to be my friend, which is fine.” Rosenkrans told me, “No trends in the industry or localized loss of revenue justified the way that the company has treated their staff since Allan Block took over.” He added: “It was a marked departure from how the company previously took care of staff.”
Not so long ago, a job at The Blade was a dream for those starting out in the industry. In 2004, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for a series exposing Vietnam War crimes, an ambitious undertaking for a regional outlet. The following year, it broke a corruption scandal that led to the criminal conviction of Bob Taft, the governor. At the time, the newsroom employed a hundred and forty-five journalists. Over the next decade, Blade reporters took home the prestigious Livingston Award and ascended the ladder of regional and national newspapers.
Even well into the 2010s, The Blade maintained a peerless commitment to community news and a large staff, avoiding the type of mass layoffs that gutted other outlets of its size. It had an animal-welfare reporter (at the direction of John Block, who required that the paper print a “dog log” of animals euthanized at the city shelter), a dedicated obituary writer, a full-time librarian, and eight staff photographers. As The Blade’s political writer, I reported from across the country, while my colleagues in the newsroom undertook ambitious investigations into housing, sexual abuse, and cold cases.
Many of The Blade’s journalists are now looking for new jobs. Others are planning to relocate or change careers. Bracken, who worked at a small newspaper in Peru, Indiana, that also shut down, is finding his resolve to stay in journalism diminished. “I enjoy journalism because it has an impact and makes me feel like I’m contributing something to society. But I don’t know how many more times I can jump ship for a newspaper, so it definitely has left a little bit of a sour feeling.” He added that BCI has had more than enough time to figure out how to turn a profit in the digital age. “This ultimately is a business decision that’s a consequence of the management of the company,” Bracken said, “not necessarily the individual reporters that are going to be stuck with the consequences.”
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