The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is closing

After striking for three years without compensation, staffers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette returned to work in late November with a hard-fought victory. Less than two months later, their paper has announced its impending closure. 

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will publish its last edition and cease operating on May 3, months after an appeals court ruled the paper had to reinstate workers’ pay and benefits under the paper’s 2014-17 union contract, return to bargaining with the union, and compensate workers who lost wages when the Post-Gazette made changes to working conditions in 2020 that violated labor law. 

The three-year strike was the longest in NewsGuild’s 92-year history. When it began on Oct. 18, 2022, 60 newsroom workers held the picket line, a number that shrank to 26 by the time the strike officially ended on Nov. 13, 2025 amid a lengthy back-and-forth legal battle. Over its duration, the Post-Gazette worked with freelancers and other major news organizations, like ProPublica, which crossed the picket line to produce coverage. Even before the strike, the union had filed a grievance against the paper after management’s decision to oust a Black reporter in 2020 during her coverage of George Floyd’s protests.

Block Communications, Inc., and the Block family, which owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, announced the news of the paper’s closure today. 

“Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette,” Block Communications said in a press release to The Objective. “Despite those efforts, the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.” 

Earlier today, the Supreme Court rejected the Post-Gazette‘s request for a stay on an injunction requiring the paper to reinstate previously agreed-upon healthcare coverage.

“Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists and the city of Pittsburgh,” Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president Andrew Goldstein said in a NewsGuild press release. The union asserted, in its statement, that the newsroom’s legal fees during the strike could’ve “paid for the costs of workers’ proposals several times over.”

The Post-Gazette is the largest newspaper serving the metro Pittsburgh area and was founded in 1786 under the title Pittsburgh Gazette, first taking the title Pittsburgh Post-Gazette during consolidation in the Pittsburgh newspaper market in 1927. The Block Communications press release cites the recent court decisions as imposing “outdated and inflexible operational practices unsuited for today’s local journalism.”

“The Block family is proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century and will exit with their dignity intact,” the release said. 

Unionized workers at the Toledo Blade, another Block-owned paper, have not had a contract since 2017.

Post-Gazette copy editor Erin Herbert and Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh first vice president said “the Post-Gazette has spent the last several years tarnishing the paper’s reputation with the community it claims to serve.” But through the striking workers’ news publication, the Pittsburgh Union Progress, “we have been able to restore and foster connections with Pittsburghers whose stories are often overlooked.” 

Goldstein, the union’s president, added in a statement on Jan. 7 that “we’re going to pursue all options to make sure that Pittsburgh continues to have the caliber of journalism it deserves.”

This is a developing story and will continue to be updated.

Update, Jan. 7: This story was updated with additional statements and context from the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.

This story was edited and copy edited by Gabe Schneider.