Last week’s column lamenting the demise of the Post-Gazette generated more feedback than usual, mostly from old fogies with fond memories of being paperboys. The more I read about the subject, the more depressing it becomes. It appears that the only cities still served by print papers seven days a week are New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and even those holdouts are experiencing dramatically reduced circulations.
My initial intention was to produce a follow-up column discussing the apparently still successful newspapers in near-by county seats, with the Washington Observer-Reporter as a principal case study. It is an excellent candidate for me, being only sixteen miles away. We are almost within its sphere of influence; the daily Observer-Reporter is available at the Giant Eagle market where I do most of my grocery shopping. I established a spreadsheet to compare eleven examples of similar papers. In addition to Washington, I included Beaver, Butler, Clarion, Franklin (not a county seat!), Johnstown, Meadville, New Castle, Oil City, Sharon, and Uniontown. In most respects these were comparable newspapers, particularly in the size of their potential market. My goal was to understand why papers of this size were surviving while their big city siblings were going bankrupt.
About halfway through this process I learned that the Derrick Publishing Company was going out of business and that print copies of the three papers they publish – the Oil City Derrick, the Franklin Times-Herald, and the Clarion News – would be terminated. Oil City and Franklin will still be served by the website Derrick.com; I have been unable to determine if Clarion will have a similar service. Apparently the plague that has wiped out so many big city print papers has spread to smaller cities as well.
I found it interesting that the only other locally owned paper in my original list of eleven is the Butler Eagle, owned by the Wise family. Ogden Newspapers owns the Observer-Reporter and the Uniontown Herald-Standard, as well as seventy-three other papers. The President of the Ogden conglomerate is Robert Nutting, the much-maligned owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Community Newspaper Holdings Incorporated (CNHI) has about the same number of small-town papers as Ogden, including the Meadville Tribune, the Sharon Herald, the New Castle News, and the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. USAToday Company, formerly known as Gannett, is the largest newspaper publisher in the United States. In addition to the national paper USA Today, the massive conglomerate publishes in numerous large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus, Nashville, Louisville, etc. – as well as in many smaller towns. Its presence in western Pennsylvania is limited to the Beaver County Times. Perhaps one of these chains will step in and rescue the Derrick newspapers, or, even better, the Post-Gazette.
What do we know about the Observer-Reporter, other than its ownership? Its circulation is about 34,000, in a county with a population of 209,000, an impressive statistic when compared with the Post-Gazette. Let’s examine a typical daily copy of the Observer-Reporter, specifically Monday, February 9, 2026. It is a classic broad sheet with six columns. It has two sections, each consisting of eight pages. Advertisements make up about twenty five percent of the available copy. The front page has three local news articles, each by Observer-Reporter writers. The biggest one covers the massive water main break in Elrama, the one that forced some Bridgeville residents to boil their drinking water. The rest of Section A consists of six national/international new items, an editorial page, obituaries, and weather. Section B has eight sports-related articles, three of which are local high schools and colleges; the remainder summarizes national (primarily basketball) scores and the Winter Olympics. Comics, Entertainment (mostly puzzles), and Classified advertisements (half of which were Public Notices) completes the section. All told, it is a very respectable newspaper with a classic subdivision – one quarter news, one quarter sports, one quarter standard features, one quarter advertisements.
At sixteen pages the daily Observer-Reporter has two thirds the content of the equivalent twenty-four-page Post-Gazette for that date. As far as I can determine, the price of its delivered print version is about three-fourths that of its big city neighbor. Perhaps the secret for survival is to reduce the price significantly, at the expense of an even greater reduction in content. Or, perhaps, the residents of a semi-rural county like Washington are simply more old-fashioned and less enamored of on-line information than their suburban neighbors.
At any rate, it does not appear to me that mimicking our “county seat” neighbors will resolve the problem here in Allegheny County. I think our current level of content is close to an acceptable minimum, especially if any reduction in content comes at the expense of local news (and sports). Consequently, my only recourse will be to go fully digital, but even that may not be possible unless some outside party initiates that service. I know that Trib-Live has a digital facsimile of their Westmoreland County version of a print paper, but I don’t know if it adequately covers local news in Allegheny County.
At this point I’d like to record a generalization that I have noticed. Although its quantitative precision may leave much to be desired, it is profound qualitatively. I believe that the cost of publishing a print newspaper is one third content, one third printing, and one third distribution, and that the content portion is equally divided into production and compilation. This goes a long way toward explaining the difference in selling price for digital copies and print copies.
So, what is ahead for us perceptive newspaper fans in Allegheny County? We must accept the fact that print journalism is obsolete and hope that some organization pops up and publishes a digital facsimile of a full-service local newspaper. I believe it would prosper at a fee of $25.00 a month.