'Lost' photos from the Post-Gazette's golden past
In the early 1990s working conditions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette were pretty horrible but the journalism was top notch.
I recently re-stumbled upon these lost photos of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workplace that were taken not long after I showed up to work there in 1989.
The PG’s editorial offices were then on the criminally over-crowded, messy, smoky, top floor of the filthy and dumpy Pittsburgh Press building on the Boulevard of the Allies.
(At the time, the building was owned and operated by the Press and their evil ‘outta-tawn’ managers at Scripps-Howard. The PG took over the building when the Block family bought out the afternoon Press in 1993 and shut it down.)
I have no idea how or where I found these photos, or where they are now, or who took them. I illegally copied then with a smartphone, but so far I’ve not been caught.
First up is the great John Craig, the big editor, sitting among his word slaves, probably writing a sweet ode to the current mayor at the time or setting up his weekly breakfast date with his powerful political pal, Allegheny County Commissioner Tom Forester. To use a "tube" -- aka a computer -- Craig had to leave his humble office and come out in the newsroom and commandeer one.
CORRECTION: My unpaid fact checker, Peter Leo, has alerted me that the guy I identified as John Craig is not John Craig at all. Though Craig often did venture into the newsroom to commandeer a tube, Peter says: “By the way, not John Craig. More like something in a Pat Lutz. The shoes are clearly non-Craigean.” Everything else I wrote is true — so far.
The PG’s cramped photo department was anchored by the great shooter John Beale and the near great golfer Mark Murphy.
The photo below stars reporter Sharon Voas and ‘Science Guy’ Byron Spice. The PG apparently had a patriotic news room long before Trump became its presidential choice. Note the comfortable, tidy working conditions. Social distancing at work obviously was not possible.
And then there was PG Radio, a five-minute, locally syndicated headline service which operated during the ‘Strike of '93,’ and was overseen by investigative reporter/future Point Park j-school professor Bill Moushey, my favorite boss ever. Here he's about to punch out me for being bald or scold Dan Rick for making a nano-second mistake while editing on a $50,000 audio/editing computer that today would be an app on a smartphone.
Last but not least was the great one-two punch of Tom Ritz and Peter Leo, two columnists who apparently were in their teens when they posed for this photo.
It’s now obvious that the 1990s was the last Golden Age of the Post-Gazette, which was staffed with more than 200 talented journalists and photographers. It had been an important and influential American newspaper in the 1930s and 1940s, as my 2017 history book ‘30 Days a Black Man’ details. But today the PG is a ghost of its former profitable, powerful and relevant self. A poster child for the death of the newspaper industry, it’s nearly digital-only and down to a daily circulation of about 100,000. But at least its newish headquarters on the North Side are spacious, quiet, clean and — sadly — uncrowded.