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Pennsylvania’s two largest cities have more in common politically, demographically, and economically with one another than with the rest of the commonwealth. For decades, they also had in common the presence of great American newspapers serving their diverse and dynamic communities: The Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Sadly, that may no longer be the case.

On Tuesday, Block Communications, the owners of the Post-Gazette, announced that on May 3, it will shutter the newspaper, the roots of which date back 240 years. The loss of a once great newspaper in a major American city is itself a civic tragedy. The fact that this loss was entirely preventable is even more unfortunate.

It is no secret that the traditional print newspaper business is in sharp decline. Self-inflicted wounds — including a long history of labor strife, family disunity, and financial losses — have compounded these headwinds at the Post-Gazette. The Block family’s announcement cited cumulative losses of over $350 million over a 20-year period.

Disclosure of a decision to close the paper came the same day the U.S. Supreme Court denied the company’s appeal of a decision that required it to honor the terms of an earlier union contract, and after the resolution of a bitter three-year labor strike. Striking workers agreed to return to work on Nov. 24 and were told this week they would be severed.

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, of which I am CEO, is in the business of helping sustain and support local news. I heard this week from more than half a dozen news industry colleagues about the potential to “save the Post-Gazette.” As a Philly-based journalism executive, I was unsure what was really left of the Post-Gazette to save. So I reached out to Pittsburgh newsroom sources, readers, and local foundations.

While the Post-Gazette has suffered multiple layoffs and a reduction in its print schedule to two days a week, there is unquestionably still a there, there. The current newsroom numbers 110 employees. And its journalists still produce great public service journalism, covering politics to sports. More importantly, with or without the Post-Gazette, there remains a need and an appetite among readers for independent local news in Pittsburgh. As of the end of 2025, more than 60,000 pay for the P-G in digital form, and 27,000 in print.

To save, reinvent, or perhaps replace the Post-Gazette, it is instructive to look at recent local news investment in Philadelphia and Baltimore:

Ten years ago this month, the late H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, a philanthropist and cable television entrepreneur, donated his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, allowing The Inquirer to invest long term in the transformation of its news and business operations.

The Inquirer’s 200-person newsroom is supported in large part by the loyalty of readers, the growth of its digital revenues, and supplemented by donations from readers, foundations, and the Lenfest Institute. The Inquirer, which remains a for-profit enterprise, is well-managed, both editorially and as a business. It has more than 120,000 paying digital subscribers, and philanthropy — a finite resource — is a single-digit percentage of total revenues, although mission-critical.

Emulating the Lenfest Institute model, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland-based hotel and healthcare executive, sought to acquire the Baltimore Sun from its parent company and to convert it to nonprofit ownership. Unable to come to terms with a difficult seller, Bainum chose instead to launch the Baltimore Banner from scratch in 2022, an impressive, all-digital nonprofit news enterprise that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting last year for coverage of its city’s opioid crisis.

Pittsburgh’s journalistic, business, and philanthropic interests have several paths open to them:

The Post-Gazette could be acquired by a nonprofit organization similar to the Lenfest Institute. However, local leaders with whom I have spoken seem loath to take on its obligations and liabilities.

The Post-Gazette is by no means the sole source of independent journalism serving Southwest Pennsylvania. The region is covered by NPR station WESA, by Pittsburgh’s Public Source, a small but effective nonprofit, and by Harrisburg-based Spotlight PA, of which the Lenfest Institute was a founder. Each of these entities could help form the foundation of expanded Pittsburgh news.

Or the community could build from scratch, mirroring the approach of the Baltimore Banner.

Each path has its complications, but they all have one thing in common: the need for determined, deep-pocketed, and strategically aligned funders to create sustainable local news at scale for the city of Pittsburgh.

Maxwell E.P. King, a former editor of The Inquirer and past president of two of Pittsburgh’s leading philanthropies — Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation — has sounded the alarm.

“I am heartbroken, both as a reader and a contributor” to the Post-Gazette, King told me. “But the community, particularly the foundation community, must rally to this moment. Nonprofit journalism is succeeding around the country, most notably in Philadelphia with The Inquirer. We have to find a viable nonprofit way to continue daily journalism here. It is crucial for the region.”

Let’s hope Pittsburgh finds the resolve to serve its residents with the local news they need and deserve. Certainly, we at the Lenfest Institute are here to help.

Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit, noncontrolling owner of The Inquirer. @jimfriedlich

I was a firsthand witness to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Inside the House chamber, we heard shouts, footsteps, and gunshots. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed off the floor. The rest of us, representatives and journalists, stayed as frozen as the Rotunda statues.

The thousands who stormed the terrace, breaking windows and doors to gain entry, were white nationalists loyal to the president who lost the 2020 election. His name is now emblazoned all over Washington: Donald Trump.

That was not only an attack on the building itself. That bitter day destroyed an illusion we Americans held dear about our nation: Fair is fair. Win or lose, peace prevailed in our elections. We took pride in our place as the world’s oldest democracy.

Echo in history

History shows that much the same thing happened in Philadelphia, the Quaker city where our cherished founding documents were drawn up by the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But slavery festered in Jacksonian America, and open hostility to abolitionists was common. Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor, was murdered by a mob in Alton, Ill. Philadelphia was not spared.

In 1838, a majestic new building changed the Philadelphia cityscape. Built by the Society of Friends (the Quakers) for abolitionist gatherings, Pennsylvania Hall was envisioned as a temple of liberty and free speech, with elegant touches like damask drapes and a sunflower-shaped mirror.

There, Philadelphia Quakers worked with “the world’s people,” as they called non-Quakers — notably Bostonians and Unitarians — to speak out against slavery. Fiery William Lloyd Garrison spoke during opening week. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, white abolitionists from South Carolina who had fled North and become Friends, bore witness to the evils of slavery.

It did not last long.

Founded in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society stood just a few blocks away.

Lucretia Mott, the leading Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist voice, cofounded the Female Anti-Slavery Society. And it was Mott who most enraged some Southerners studying medicine in the city.

The medical students jeered at Black and white female abolitionists walking together in pairs, a procession led by Mott. The word for Black-white mixed company in those days was “amalgamation,” and the racist Southerners would not tolerate it, hurling insults at the members of the Female Anti-Slavery Society.

On Sixth Street, the students grew into a pack of hundreds, perhaps thousands, rioting and eventually focusing on the beautiful hall, which they burst into and set ablaze in one of the worst mob scenes in antebellum America.

Narrow escape

But the rampage was not over. Lucretia and James Mott, their son, Thomas, and others went to the Mott home on North Ninth Street. They sensed the mob might be looking for them, and they were right.

They were spared an ugly scene by the Quaker poet and journalist, John Greenleaf Whittier. He kept pace with the moving mob as it shouted, “To the Motts!” and pointed them in the wrong direction. (Much as Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman did in the U.S. Senate on Jan. 6.)

Instead, the mob damaged Mother Bethel, a Black church and the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the nation, as well as a nearby Black orphanage.

That shattering night shocked Philadelphia’s civic pride as a haven for freedom and democracy. Was it a place where the free Black community could still feel safe? Clearly not.

For sobered antislavery advocates, the riot and fire landed as a moment of reckoning. Violence in Philadelphia meant they had an even more determined foe in proslavery forces than they had thought. Abolitionists would have to rise from the ashes and press their campaign harder for the next 25 years.

Today, we may see Pennsylvania Hall’s burning as a template for the savage attack on the Capitol in our own era. White nationalism, no stranger to America’s streets, rose again — with a vengeance.

Jamie Stiehm, author of “The War Within” and a Creators Syndicate columnist, is at work on a biography of Lucretia Mott. She lives in Washington, D.C.