In the span of eight days, a single family decimated Pittsburgh’s print journalism infrastructure. On December 30, Block Communications shuttered the Pittsburgh City Paper, a 34-year-old alternative weekly that the company had acquired in the midst of its ongoing labor dispute with Post-Gazette journalists. Then on January 8, just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to halt a lower court order requiring the company to honor its union contract, the Blocks announced they would close the Post-Gazette as well. Together, the two publications represented 274 years of Pittsburgh journalism. The Blocks erased the city’s print ecosystem in a single week, because they could, because no one stopped them, and because American media law gave them the right.
“They have the power to shut down two legacy publications within eight days of each other, which should not be allowed in any market, let alone one as small as Pittsburgh,” said Erin Hebert, vice president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, who contributed to the Post-Gazette’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
For Natalie Duleba, a web editor and newsletter writer who endured the three-year strike only to learn her job would cease to exist, the closure was a “gut punch“. “It’s a big rug pull to know that come May, there’s no job for me or anyone.”
The twin closures embody the limits of legal protection afforded to workers and local news alike. For all its potential enforcement mechanisms, American labor law has no answer for an employer willing to shut down rather than comply with a court order. Workers can prevail at every level and still find themselves without a workplace to return to. At the same time, decades of media consolidation had allowed the Blocks to obtain an alarming stranglehold over Pittsburgh’s print market, giving them the unilateral power to eliminate both papers whenever they chose.
$350 Million in Losses, Two Papers Destroyed
In announcing the Post-Gazette closure, Block Communications cited more than $350 million in losses over the past 20 years and characterized recent court rulings as forcing the paper to operate under. “outdated and inflexible operational practices” incompatible with today’s media landscape. Staff learned of the decision via a mandatory Zoom meeting with less than an hour’s notice. “There was a face I’d never seen before in a prerecorded video, who delivered some pretty bad news in a two-minute video,” said Noah Hiles, a sports reporter. For the City Paper closure, Block Communications offered a terser explanation, claiming the alt-weekly’s business model had not reached an adequate level of “financial performance” that allowed continued operation.
The Post-Gazette’s financial situation, viewed in context, undermines Block Communications’ claims of unsustainability. The company reportedly generated $1.1 billion in revenue last year, and in August 2025, sold its broadcast television stations to Gray Media for $80 million. Against that backdrop, the Post-Gazette’s losses, averaging $17.5 million annually, represented a fraction of a diversified media conglomerate’s operations. The Blocks had options for the paper. But instead of negotiating, selling, or restructuring, they opted to destroy everything rather than share power.
Upon acquiring the City Paper in January 2023, Allan Block declared the family “happy to further our commitment to the city of Pittsburgh” and pledged to support “this well-established entertainment and alternative news publication.” Block Communications ran the City Paper for nearly three years, during which time there was little public indication of trouble. The alt-weekly was non-union, and when editor Ali Trachta announced the shift to quarterly print in October 2025, she pointed to industry-wide forces rather than ownership: “We’re facing rising costs and less revenue, but also, misinformation, hostility towards media, a rough economy, and a loss of talent to more stable industries.” Five staff members were laid off. Two months later, Block Communications shuttered the paper entirely without further explanation.
City Paper workers had no recourse when the cuts came, while at the Post-Gazette, journalists spent decades building the tools to fight back, and when management moved against them, they deployed those tools for more than three years across picket lines and federal courtrooms. Yet both publications met the same fate.
The Block Family’s Market Control
Block Communications, based in Toledo, Ohio, is controlled by twin brothers Allan and John Block. The family has owned the Post-Gazette since 1927 and acquired the City Paper in January 2023, just three months after Post-Gazette journalists walked off the job. At the same moment they were locked in combat with their own unionized journalists, the Blocks moved to consolidate their grip on Pittsburgh’s print market by purchasing the city’s leading alternative weekly.
For more than three decades, the City Paper had served Pittsburgh as an alternative weekly, covering local news, arts, and entertainment from a left-leaning perspective and distributing roughly 70,000 free copies each week. By 2015, it ranked as the 14th largest alternative weekly in the country by circulation. Under the Blocks, that trajectory reversed, and within three years they killed it entirely.
“This is a loss for us, but it’s a bigger loss for Pittsburgh readers,” City Paper editor Colin Williams wrote on social media after the closure. “This city deserves better.”
Beyond the closures, the brothers’ conduct has consistently generated controversy. In 2019, John Block reportedly appeared intoxicated in the Post-Gazette newsroom late on a Saturday night and was described by witnesses as threatening staff. In a 2022 interview, he characterized guild members as “malcontents…who were wanting to come in and grieve the fact that their mother didn’t love them when they were five.” As major Republican donors, the Blocks have also drawn internal resistance at the Post-Gazette for their pro-Trump editorial positions. In announcing the closure, the family asserted they would “exit with their dignity intact,” a framing that prompted Hebert to observe, “There are a lot of people in the city that have a hunger for something that is not run by the Block family.”
The Limits of Labor Law
American labor law offered these two groups of workers radically different protections. City Paper workers had no union, which meant no standing before the NLRB, no contract to enforce, no legal avenue to challenge ownership. Post-Gazette workers had all of that: a union that had represented them for more than two decades, a collective bargaining agreement, access to federal labor law’s full arsenal. One group could do nothing when the cuts came, while the other could fight back, and did.
When the Post-Gazette strike began in October 2022, roughly 60 journalists walked out alongside production, distribution, and advertising workers from four sibling unions. Over the course of three years, the other unions either settled or accepted buyouts, but the journalists held out even as their numbers dwindled to fewer than 30. Throughout that time, they never stopped working, launching the Pittsburgh Union Progress, a strike paper that published more than 4,000 stories and provided extensive coverage of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. In courtroom after courtroom, they prevailed before the NLRB, the Third Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene on the company’s behalf. City Paper workers, meanwhile, watched their October layoffs and December closure with no legal mechanism to intervene.
Workers can prevail at every level and still find themselves without a workplace to return to.
Yet American labor law has teeth only when employers want to keep operating. For City Paper workers, the law simply did not reach them, offering no mechanism to challenge ownership’s decisions and no agency to hear their case. The Post-Gazette workers who had spent three years fighting discovered something equally brutal, that even total legal victory cannot save a workplace when the owner prefers destruction to compliance. In theory, the NLRB can compel an employer to negotiate, reinstate fired workers, and restore stripped benefits, but in practice, it cannot order a company to keep its doors open. Under the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Textile Workers v. Darlington, an employer can close an entire business for anti-union reasons without committing an unfair labor practice. Faced with court orders that would have forced them to operate under a union contract, the Blocks shuttered the papers instead, leaving both groups of workers in the same place.
A City Without Print
With the Post-Gazette’s closure, Pittsburgh will become the largest American city without a daily newspaper. The Tribune-Review, the region’s only remaining general-interest paper, went fully digital in 2016 and operates with a newsroom less than half the Post-Gazette’s size. Not since the Tampa Tribune ceased publication in 2016 has a major American metro daily shut down entirely.
Yet Pittsburgh’s situation is uniquely dire due to the twin losses. In other cities that lost their flagship dailies, alternative weeklies, niche publications, and digital startups remained to fill the gaps. Pittsburgh had the City Paper for that role, until the Blocks killed it just before announcing the Post-Gazette’s end. Taken together, they represent a wholesale divestment from local journalism in a major American city.
Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato called the dual shutdowns a “gaping hole” in the local news environment, while Andrew Conte, managing director of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University, referred to them as a “seismic change” for the entire region. Pennsylvania Congresswoman Summer Lee, however, placed blame squarely on ownership, stating that Block Communications has “failed our region.”
History has shown us time and again that when cities lose their newspapers, the devastation unravels civic life and seeps into the basic functioning of local democracy.
Taken together, they represent a wholesale divestment from local journalism in a major American city.
Through beat reporters and investigative teams, local news organizations serve as essential infrastructure, giving citizens what they need to participate in their own governance. In communities that have lost their primary news source, voter turnout has dropped and fewer candidates have stepped forward to run for office, while corruption has risen and community engagement has faded. Even municipal balance sheets bear the scars, with borrowing costs rising 5 to 11 basis points after a newspaper closes and adding $650,000 to each bond issue. Local newspapers are the eyes and ears of the public. When they disappear, so does the watchdog function that kept residents informed and elected officials accountable, leaving behind a calamitous void.
For unionized newsrooms across the country, Pittsburgh may recalibrate how workers approach labor disputes. Many of those newsrooms are already embattled, facing the same advertising collapse and readership decline that Block Communications cited in its closure announcement. The Blocks demonstrated that an owner facing an unfavorable ruling can eliminate the workplace itself, transforming a union victory into a pyrrhic one. Workers elsewhere weighing whether to organize or hold the line could grow discouraged, fearing that victory could accelerate rather than prevent an organization’s demise.
Pittsburgh’s Post-Block Era
During the strike, the Union Progress demonstrated that worker-run journalism could sustain itself. If the ultimate leverage in any labor dispute belongs to whoever is willing to destroy the enterprise, then a worker-owned or nonprofit successor removes that threat from the equation entirely.
In Philadelphia, the Inquirer survived its own ownership turmoil by transitioning to nonprofit status through the Lenfest Institute. Out in Colorado, The Sun exists because journalists refused to let a hedge fund determine their newsroom’s fate and built an independent outlet instead. Across the Atlantic, The Guardian has operated under a trust structure since 1936, insulating its editorial operations from the whims of any single owner. Pittsburgh’s journalists would be joining a tradition, not starting one.
The Union Progress ceased publication when strikers returned to the Post-Gazette in November, but the infrastructure and relationships built during those three years remain. Workers are now asking supporters to sign pledges backing whatever form local journalism takes after the Blocks exit, whether that means the Post-Gazette under new ownership, a revival of the Union Progress, or something entirely new.
Steve Mellon, a photographer who has worked at the Post-Gazette since 1992, remains resolute: “Don’t count out the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. We’ve been up against gigantic odds in the past and we’ve come through. We know how to organize.”
Reporting Note
This article draws on reporting, public records, court filings, and research from labor organizations, journalism advocacy groups, academic institutions, and federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Supreme Court, the NewsGuild, and media policy scholars studying consolidation and local news collapse. It also incorporates contemporaneous reporting and primary-source statements from workers, union representatives, and public officials, alongside coverage from outlets including WESA, The New York Times, Poynter, Nieman Lab, Editor & Publisher, CBS News Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Union Progress, to situate the closures within broader patterns of media consolidation, labor law limitations, and the erosion of local journalism infrastructure.
