I am an enthusiastic fan of Hugh Henry Brackenridge because of his role as a founding father of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. He shared the vision of his Princeton classmate and close friend James Madison; a new nation whose leaders would be selected by “the people”, with the caveat that the selectors be educated and well informed. To promote education, he founded the Pittsburgh Academy, whose direct descendant is the University of Pittsburgh, a world class educational institution. For information, he imported John Scull and a printing press from Philadelphia and founded the Pittsburgh Gazette. It spawned a number of newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which flaunts its heritage on its masthead. Unfortunately the P-G is not world class; in fact, it is going out of business this year.
For me, the news that the Block family has finally given up and is planning to cease publication of the Post-Gazette is distressing. I have been a big fan of print journalism for most of my life. When I was a child, my mother’s brother, Raymond Klees, was the owner/publisher of the Cameron County Press-Independent, “The only paper in the whole world that gives a damn about Cameron County!” She had actually worked in the print shop and was proud of the fact that she “could set type as well as any man”. I have fond memories of visiting the shop in Emporium and being thrilled by the process that turned out this excellent weekly paper, not to mention enjoying reading it in Bridgeville each week when it arrived by mail.
In those days, we had our choice of three Pittsburgh papers – the Post-Gazette in the morning and the Sun-Telegraph and Press in the evening. In 1940 the daily Press cost three cents at a newsstand and consisted of thirty-four pages; the Sunday Press cost a dime and boasted one hundred and sixteen pages. Published by Scripps-Howard, the Press was moderately liberal; its evening rival, the Sun-Tele, reflected the severely conservative views of William Randolph Hearst. Our subscription to the Sun-Tele was driven by my stubborn insistence when I learned that was the only place I could read the Lone Ranger comic strip. My recollection is that the Post-Gazette was completely middle-of-the-road. Being the only morning paper, they had no requirement to humor either side.
I have retained my subscription to the Post-Gazette despite its recent reduction in service. Currently I pay $36.33 a month to receive print copies on Thursday and Sunday and digital access the other five days. On digital days I choose the PGe version that provides me with a view of a pseudo-print paper on my iPad tablet and the option to page through about twenty-four pages, clicking on articles that attract my attention and “zooming” them to a size that I can read. That is my breakfast routine each day and my primary source of local, national, and global news. The Thursday print copy is about sixty pages; finishing it involves a move to my living room easy chair and my morning cup of coffee. The eighty pages of the Sunday hard copy usually require a second cup of coffee. Sunday highlights for me are David Shribman’s column in the “Insight” (editorial) section, occasional articles by Bob Podurgiel in the “Goodness” section, and the Prince Valiant episode in the “Comics” section. It is clear to me that I get my money’s worth out of $36.33 a month for this service. Incidentally, I could go fully digital for $16.25 a month and skip the print copies.
The Block family reported losses averaging over seventeen million dollars a year as the reason for their decision. The announcement came a few hours after the Supreme Court declined to overturn a lower court ruling that favored the paper’s labor union, still involved in a three year long dispute with the publisher. Folks “in the know” report that there are several possible candidates to step in and keep a major newspaper in Pittsburgh, including the Hoffman Family of Companies, the organization currently negotiating to purchase the Penguin Hockey franchise. The Hoffman Family owns fifty three percent of Lee Enterprises, the fourth largest newspaper group in the United States, totaling seventy-two papers including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A comparison of the Post-Dispatch and Post-Gazette is interesting. Both serve comparable populations (300,000 in the core city); both have comparable digital subscribers (about 85,000). Both have about 35,000 subscribers for print versions. The Post-Dispatch is available six days a week as printed copy.
Analysts reporting on the decline of the print journalism industry blame it on two primary factors – the preference of a major portion of the customer base for digital access rather that print, and the loss of advertising revenue to other media. The combined circulation of the two Pittsburgh evening papers in the 1940s is estimated to have been well over four hundred thousand copies, an average of one subscription per household in Allegheny County. In contrast, today’s Sunday Post-Gazette prints thirty-five thousand copies (because of the union dispute the papers are actually printed by the Butler Eagle) and has another fifty thousand digital subscribers; in the meantime the population of Allegheny County has remained essentially static. The advertising aspect is somewhat complicated. The daily 1940s Pittsburgh Press had ten of its thirty-four pages full page advertisements by major department stores – none of whom exist today. The institutions that do advertise today prefer digital media, primarily because there is concrete evidence of the number of viewers who actually “click on” a specific advertisement.
I share Brackenridge’s concern about the necessity that voters be well informed. Print newspapers were a traditional dependable source of information; I regret to see them disappear. A future column will discuss the situation of smaller city daily papers, like the Washington Observer-Reporter, and their struggle to survive.