The closure follows a years-long labor dispute in which the company was found by federal regulators to have bargained in bad faith with its journalists, driving union members on strike for more than three years. The Supreme Court’s rejection of the company’s appeal on the same day as the shutdown announcement left Block Communications with no remaining legal recourse on the health care enforcement order.
Block Communications Inc. announced Wednesday it will cease publication of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on May 3, closing one of Pennsylvania’s oldest newspapers after the company said two decades of financial losses had become unsustainable. The announcement came on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court declined PG Publishing Co. Inc.’s emergency appeal to halt a National Labor Relations Board order requiring the company to honor health care coverage terms from an expired union contract.
The Post-Gazette, which reported average paid circulation of 83,000 and published on Thursdays and Sundays, has been owned by Block Communications for decades. The Toledo, Ohio-based company said it had lost hundreds of millions of dollars operating the paper over that span and deemed “continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.”
Labor dispute
The closure follows more than five years of conflict with the paper’s union journalists. The Post-Gazette declared it had reached a bargaining impasse with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and unilaterally imposed terms and conditions of employment on those workers. The paper was later found to have bargained in bad faith — specifically by making offers not intended to help reach a deal and by declaring an impasse prematurely.
That determination drove union members on strike for more than three years. A couple dozen of those workers returned to the newsroom in November, a partial resumption that preceded Wednesday’s shutdown announcement by roughly two months.
Andrew Goldstein, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, said the owners had chosen confrontation over compliance with federal labor law.
“Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists and the city of Pittsburgh,” Goldstein said.
The union said employees were informed of the closure in a video on Zoom in which company officials did not speak live.
Ownership statement
The Block family said in a statement it was “proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century.”
Goldstein said the paper’s journalists had a long history of award-winning work.
History
The Post-Gazette traces its roots to 1786, when the Pittsburgh Gazette began as a four-page weekly and became a leading advocate for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. The paper passed through a series of mastheads and owners before 1927, when Paul Block acquired it and gave it its current name.