There’s been a lot of reminiscing about the founding of the nation this year—a year which also saw the first edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette printed 240 years ago.
Now the Post-Gazette, it was set to become the latest historic newspaper to file for bankruptcy and vanish into the history columns, but a nonprofit founded to protect America’s local papers have saved it.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which published one of its very first editions with the text of that new Constitution that everybody was talking about in Philly, was sold on May 4th to the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism.
The Venetoulis Institute is owned by a hotel magnate named Stewart Bainum Jr., and the PPG is the second paper the Institute has acquired following its purchase of the Baltimore Banner in 2022.
“Local journalism is essential to a strong community, but across the country the business model has been under severe strain,” Bainum said in the press release. “We believe there is a path forward — one that combines great journalism with a diversified business model built on scale and exceptional talent.”
Indeed the PPG was hemorrhaging money. It operated at a loss for 2 decades, losing some $350 million. The Institute will be willing to absorb some of those losses going forward, but a restructuring is likely taking place. CBS reported that all 171 writers were expected to reapply for their jobs.
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The Post-Gazette was the first American newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains, and that is where it is set to stay under the new ownership agreement. Limited print editions, which the paper had been running on Thursday and Sunday, are expected to continue.
The paper has won 3 Pulitzer Prize awards for journalism and photography, with its first in 1938 for an investigation into how a then-recently appointed Supreme Court justice had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and most recently in 2019 for its coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
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