The news is announced that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s premier newspaper for decades - that would be The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - is shutting down. Permanently.
Ahhh, the memories.
As a young press secretary to then-Pennsylvania U.S. Senator John Heinz in the 1980’s, it was my task to arrange editorial meetings between Republican re-election candidate Heinz -- the scion of the legendary Pittsburgh family that famously bears his family name on a zillion bottles of ketchup and more.
The “PG” as it was shorthanded, was, as I recall, then a tad on the left-leaning side of American politics. It’s editorial board would occasional bristle at moderate Republican Heinz not leaning further left.
And then as time moved on, the PG became, it appeared, more conservative. (And three cheers for that!)
Memorably, this rightward bent began publicly materializing in the form of not running political cartoons from left-leaning cartoonist Rob Rogers, who had been cartooning for the PG since the Stone Age of 1993. The New York Times, in 2018, headlined this out of Pittsburgh:
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Cartoonist Fired as Paper Shifts Right
The Times story reported:
Mr. Rogers is unabashedly liberal and many of his cartoons, including several the paper refused to publish, were critical of President Trump.
The Times also noted:
PITTSBURGH — Rob Rogers joined The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as a staff editorial cartoonist in 1993 and for years his cartoons have appeared in the newspaper roughly five days a week. But in late May, around Memorial Day, he said, they began disappearing.
In just over a week, Mr. Rogers said, six of them were killed, one after it had been placed on a page. The first of the killed cartoons, which Mr. Rogers posted to social media and on his website, depicted President Trump placing a wreath on a tombstone that read “Truth, Honor, Rule of Law.”
Suffice to say, as Rogers’ cartoons indicated, he was no Trump fan.
Mind you, turning into a not-Trump fan in an election in which Trump carried Pennsylvania was doubtless not a sure-fire way to sell papers.
Now, for whatever reason, the owners of the PG have finally decided to pull the plug. The Times owner, Block Communications, was quoted as saying this of the cartoonist:
Mr. Rogers, whose cartoons are unabashedly liberal, said he was uneasy about his future at the paper from the time Mr. (Keith) Burris (the editorial page editor) was brought on board. 'They clearly had a mission to change the editorial page and I wasn’t getting in line so they decided it was time to change the cartoon as well,' he said.
And so it goes.
I confess I have mixed feelings about the shutdown. Always believing that vigorous debate is a hallmark of democracy, the idea that a major newspaper in my home state is going out of existence.
Even more disturbing was this from The Washington Post:
After exhausting legal avenues in a losing labor battle with unionized employees, the owners of one of the nation’s oldest newspapers have shut it down.
Which says, in essence, that the paper’s unionized employees have ended their own jobs at a decidedly historic local paper.
Not good. Not good at all.
So. The future arrives in Pittsburgh’s world of journalism.
Stay tuned.
