The recent weeks – in which the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been rescued from near-death by a billionaire philanthropist – seem an age from when we were writing about the commissioning of their new press.
It’s less than a dozen years.
Operations director Lisa Hurm had waited a decade-and-a-half for the new press, until then helping coax the paper out on an elderly Hoe letterpress – some of which dated to 1956 – that had been rebuilt and extended with some KBA flexo units.
Finally in September 2014, we could report the commissioning of the long-awaited Goss Uniliner, housed in a new print centre, along with mailroom, IT and a call centre.
You’d think all their problems might then have been over, but it wasn’t so. There’d been disputes with Teamsters at the time the Block family bought Pittsburgh Press from Scripps; a recurrence came 30 years later, with a dispute that ran for three years.
A New Year court decision favouring the union has now been the final blow, making continued operation of the newspaper “untenable” after what chief executive Allan Block described as “like being underwater for the last 20 years”.
Enter Maryland hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr and his wife Sandy, whose Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for its start-up Baltimore Banner. Their stated aim is to revive local news in the US.
The institute took over the assets of the Post-Gazette last month, a day after it was to have ceased operations, and with respected executive emeritus editor David Shribman joining the board.
The Banner is reportedly yet to turn a profit – but tracking well, with 79,500 paid subscribers – and the Bainums have seeded Venetoulis with an additional $30 million, in a five-year pledge ahead of the purchase of the Post-Gazette – though numbers in its 100-strong newsroom “might need to be trimmed”.
Indeed, expectations may have been – as Block had suggested – unrealistic. The state’s biggest newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer already belongs to a nonprofit in the Lenfest Institute.
For Allan Block – whose family launched the Post-Gazette from a 1927 merger of mastheads that dated to 1786 – the handover, reported to have been at a substantial discount was a bittersweet moment, “like part of me being torn away”. Block will continue to publish the Toledo Blade and other media-related businesses, including cable and broadband services.
And the 2014 press? A triple-wide Goss Uniliner – four towers and a double-couple folder, able to print a 48-pages of colour – was sold last year to the Houston Chronicle, and moved in record time to its new home by engineers from manroland Goss web systems Americas, the successor to the company that made it. As Chronicle management told a recent International Newspaper Group convention audience, it was a unique opportunity.
Peter Coleman
Pictured: The Post-Gazette offices (top) and ‘opportunity’ Uniliner press in Houston, which will host this year’s ING conference (below)