Don't save the old PG, create a modern new one
The ambitious nonprofit organization from Baltimore that has saved the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from extinction needs to reinvent the 'newspaper' for the 21st century. Before it's too late.
Update: May 1
The new owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have decided which 60 of the 100 or so journalists of the old PG to hire and now they have to figure out how to run and finance a deliberately nonprofitable newspaper in the Digital Age.
The last-minute rescue of the PG by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit that so far seems to know what it’s doing with The Baltimore Banner, was good news for the PG and a city that badly needs good journalism.
Too bad it took so long ...
About 15 years ago I scribbled down on a legal tablet what I thought the Block Family, the owners of the PG since the late 1920s, and then-editor David Shribman should do to reverse the death spiral the morning paper was obviously already in:
-- declare bankruptcy
-- fire every editorial employee
-- dissolve or refuse to recognize the union
-- hire back the best third of the ex-employees
-- re-imagine and reconstruct the newspaper model for the 21st century -- editorially and financially (if possible).
Since then some of the above has already come true, or half true, all by itself.
I don’t pretend to know how the PG can succeed financially. I have a better grasp of what it needs to do editorially and journalistically to make it useful, interesting and valuable to consumers and the city.
My knowledge of newspapers comes from working at three daily papers in LA and Pittsburgh from the 1970s to 2009.
At each place I deliberately tried in my small subversive way to make the papers more reader friendly, more like magazines, more fun and entertaining to read and less friendly to politicians and local government powers.
No Pulitzer yet, but I did some things that made my mother proud and I had a modestly successful and happy newspaper career full of fun.
It’s 15 years too late for the old PG, but here, for the record, is my 2.5 cents worth of advice to its new owners in Baltimore:
-- PG 2.0 should be nothing like PG 1.0. What it should be should have been obvious long ago -- a multi-media portal of news and opinion.
It should be built by journalists as a digital community bulletin board where Pittsburghers go first for their news. I’d make it a strong partner and collaborator with KDKA-TV.
A PG/KD portal should carry every possible local web site, blogger, pro sports team site it can find, plus links or content from the Pittsburgh Courier, the ghost of the great black weekly.
Other places -- Next, Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburgh Quarterly, the regional Senator John Heinz History Center, official community/municipal websites, etc. Anything to do with Pittsburgh news and opinion should be included, not excluded.
News-wise, a PG/KD portal loaded with tons of KD video should be all digital, 24/7. There should be a single print edition -- Sunday, which would go deep on big stories and focus on analysis, solid, long/real journalism, Pittsburgh history (untapped heretofore).
The portal should strive to provide lively, edgy, but fair and balanced journalism and should not be in bed with the Chamber or City Hall or the partisan Democrat machine that has overseen or contributed to the decline of a once great American city.
Politically, a reborn PD/KD partnership has to be a trustworthy, honest, transparent and principled and balanced blend of the old PG’s liberal Democrat editorial/opinion (pre-Trump) and the Trib’s pre-Trump conservative/libertarian Republicanism.
The old PG -- and I saw this happening in the late 1990s -- slowly and foolishly drove away most of its relatively few Republican readers (and opened the door for Richard Scaife’s conservative/libertarian Pittsburgh Trib, where I worked in the 2000s).
Three decades of progressive politics and Democrat Party-friendly editorial positions, columnists and news coverage did real damage to the PG.
It created a silo of sheltered liberal readers who ditched their subscriptions when its publisher John Block did his infamous 180-degree flip from Obama love to Trump love in 2016.
(It was a prequel to the turmoil that would later rock the core liberal readership and editorial staffs at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times when their billionaire publishers decided during Trump II to enforce more ideological balance and less derangement in their opinion sections.)
A new Red/Blue PG/KD “paper,” as a non-profit, will not be allowed to endorse candidates (as if anyone really ever cared whom the paper endorsed). Therefore, it should offer two (or many more) sides to important political issues. RealClearPolitics.com is a good and successful model to look at; it’s owned and operated by conservatives but it’s a reasonably fair platform in our super-siloed world.
The new PG/KD also should recruit/tap its ex-staffers -- its retired journalists and critics — as freelancers.
Their experience, expertise and historical knowledge largely went to waste after they retired because of Newspaper Guild rules and because the steadily shrinking PG didn’t have the resources to cover entertainment, books, local plays, high school sports, etc.
Stringers should cover the satellite communities and the sticks — and communities should be urged to provide C-SPAN-like video coverage to the PG/KD portal of their council meetings and school board doings.
It’s too late now, but more than a decade ago, after I quit newspapers, I proposed this “radical” solution to an editor at the PG:
The paper should hire 10 or 15 young and hungry (and cheap) journalists, give them an iPhone, no desk, and a specific territory of his or her very own to cover and comment upon.
If a plane crashes in Blawnox or Peters Township, for example, the local PG/KD reporter stationed there would immediately cover it with video and words texted to PG HQs, where it’d be edited, rewritten, etc., and put up online ASAP.
It’d be like the 1920s and ‘30s when reporters would phone into the office with details of a fire and the rewrite man would type it up. It’d be a return to a newspaper being able to do breaking news -- which, when perfected, could easily beat local TV and radio.
Finally, with all due respect to my fellow journalists and ex-bosses who taught me everything I think I know, the people who shape a future PG/KD portal should not be the same people who’ve spent the last 30 years losing about half a billion dollars running the PG and the Pittsburgh Trib aground.
The newspaper business model and its top-down journalism culture of yore is long dead. It can’t attract new (young) customers and it can’t make money. It needs new ideas, new editorial and business models and new blood -- young blood.
In other words, Baltimore Banner owners, don’t just save the old PG. Throw away the 19th century blueprints and remake it for the 21st century.
We all know the city of Pittsburgh and its suburbs and satellite cities need real journalism and a good, honest and trustworthy “newspaper,” but if it’s going to survive, the PG 2.0 has to be a new creature, a mammal, not a dinosaur.
Thanks, Sue. It only took me 40 years to write. I don't think I'll be going to any more cocktail parties with my fellow PG alums.
Bill, this is great!