[Originally posted to LinkedIn on January 14, 2026 and reposted here for archival purposes.]
What’s new? What’s news?
Let me say at the outset that I do not have the answer. I only have a question. This essay is my Jeopardy!-ish contribution to the second-most important conversation happening in Pittsburgh right now. Maybe that’s appropriate; 25 years ago, I appeared on Jeopardy! I made a foolish bet in Final Jeopardy!, and I lost. I’ll try again. The question is: Who’s in?
What does that mean?
The first and most important conversation in Pittsburgh today is, of course, some version of “how are the Steelers going to right the ship?” The second, which drives my theme, is “what should happen to the news if the Post-Gazette stops publishing, as it seems poised to do?”
Curiously, or perhaps not, the conversations are related. I’ll walk through the argument that, like a good rug, ties them together.
First of all, the conversation about the Post-Gazette cannot and should not be framed or driven by journalists themselves. That’s right: the people with the expertise and career commitment, the people who know the news, the people who earned their places in journalistic leadership, are not the people to figure out what should happen to the news in Pittsburgh after the Post-Gazette is gone.
I understand, I think, why they think that they might take the lead (or lede). They’ve been in the trenches. They’ve seen mighty journalistic institutions get built (and helped to build them, themselves), then slip, and in some cases – too many cases – fail. They want to be parts of the next building project. The news is, in some understandable way, their legacy.
But the news, whatever it is, isn’t really about them. It’s about us – the people who live and work here in Western Pennsylvania. It’s about our neighborhoods and our neighbors, about the companies and other organizations that employ us, entertain us, feed us, and more. It’s about the governments that we elect and try to hold accountable. It’s about our present, and it’s about our future.
And the news is not only about us. It’s about money and power. Our money. Our power. Where and how we receive it, earn it, spend it, share it, build with it, give it away. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” remains the one true maxim of all flavors of economics, and “it’s the economy, stupid” applies to newsgatherers as well as to politicians. The news is about what we value and how we value it. Currency matters, pun intended.
Why me?
On and off over the last 20-plus years, since I started my social media “career,” I’ve lobbed journalism-themed posts into the Burgh-o-sphere and beyond. I can’t help it. Sometimes, things need to be said. Sometimes, people need to be called on, and called in. My relative naivete was my liability, in a way, at least to start, but I learned to turn it into a strength. I’m here to ask questions rather than take things for granted. I may be in no better position to do this than anyone else. But I am in no worse position, either.
All hands on deck.
I grew up in a journalistic household. I was surrounded by family and friends who were in different parts of the business. I wrote. I had a bunch of local by-lined stories in nearby weeklies and dailies long before I graduated from high school. Not long after I came to Pittsburgh and started poking around via my blog, I met and talked with John Craig about this stuff, back when John Craig was still alive and serving as the wise elder of Pittsburgh journos. I met a fair number of other writers and editors at the Post-Gazette, and the Tribune-Review, and the City Paper. I got to know people in TV and radio, too.
With Chad Hermann, then “Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman” (an early, sharp-eyed Pittsburgh blog), I once led a lunch-and-learn at the PG on the subject of social media … before it was social media. I had lunch with David Shribman to talk about what the PG might do as it became obvious that digital would largely kill print. Lean into local coverage and lean into sports, I recommended, and leave most national and international coverage to other, national outlets. David Shribman seemed unimpressed. He won a Pulitzer Prize, after all, for national reporting with the Boston Globe.
Recently, here on LinkedIn, I revisited and reworked notes from some of my earlier blog entries, in the wake of the announcement that the Post-Gazette would close. My most recent “summation,” about Pittsburgh and other big-city dailies, was posted in 2016. That’s at least how long “what’s next?” has been the question.
If the news isn’t really (only) the news, then: so what? A first thought
A friend sent me an invitation to a “Future of Pittsburgh Journalism” panel being presented at the Heinz History Center. It’s scheduled for January 29. It’s hosted by Doug Heuck and his Pittsburgh Tomorrow team. Doug was a stellar journalist years ago for the Post-Gazette. Find and read his work from back in the day on the homeless population of Pittsburgh. It’s impressive. And the panelists at this upcoming event are pretty much everyone you’d expect to turn up if you sent out a call for today’s Pittsburgh newsgathering leaders, at least if you focused mostly on print, or the legacy of print.
I’m certain that the panel will be lively and entertaining. I love listening to journalists talk; I’ve been around professional journalists my entire life. Literally: my entire life. They are curious people, meaning curious about the world (sometimes they are curious in other ways). That curiosity gives them their wit and intelligence and their stories. They are raconteurs par excellence. They are often funny, and fun. Stereotypically, they drink as hard as they work. Someday, I’ll share an anecdote about my giving a ride home to a certain celebrated PG columnist after an evening of carousing. The carousing never got out of hand, and no amount of carousing could dislodge his nose for news. There was a time when Pittsburgh really was the home of one of the country’s great newspapers.
But that panel is not who I want to hear from right now. That panel is the currently constituted group of people presiding over Pittsburgh’s version of an industry that has been sinking slowly into the digital mire for at least 20 years. The Post-Gazette wasn’t thriving up until the moment recently that the Blocks decided to pull the plug. The Post-Gazette was one sick puppy, and it had been one sick puppy for a very long time. Along with the Tribune-Review and every other general purpose news outlet in Western Pennsylvania.
And the news people will talk about the news business, which is not, to me, the conversation that needs to be had.
If not the news people, then who, and what? A second thought
If, now, I don’t want to hear from a chorus of newspaper editors, who do I want to hear from?
The other day, the Pittsburgh Business Times published its annual list of Pittsburgh’s “Power 100.” As the PBT puts it, this is a list of “the region’s most influential business leaders.” But the list covers not just the for-profit world; higher ed, philanthropy, and other non-profit organizations are well-represented. As the PBT wrote:
“To develop our list, we asked ourselves a series of questions: Who has the power to move the market? Whose clout reaches beyond their company or industry? Who in the business community does the governor or local leaders call for help? Who do you need to know to do business in this town? Who is likely to shape our futures?” I added the italics.
Maybe the PBT missed the mark a little bit; maybe it included some folks who don’t belong there and omitted some who do. That’s likely true for any list of that sort. But I need a reference point, and the PBT list is as good as it probably gets for my purposes. So:
That’s my go-to pool of talent. That’s who I want to hear from right now. What does the future of the news look like in Pittsburgh? I want to know: which of these people are going to step up?
Why look to the power elite?
Once upon a time, and in mostly a good way, this – a working group of the region’s power elite – was how things got done in Pittsburgh If I’m known around town, I’m known among other things for laying down a marker in public about 20 years ago that said: the Allegheny Conference on Community Development is, today, mostly a waste of everyone’s time and money. (The piece was published in the Sunday Post-Gazette.) But that’s the Conference today, not the Conference’s original model. The early form of the Conference, going back to the 1940s, involved corporate presidents and CEOs personally in the room with the Mayor. Companies didn’t send in dues and delegates and get institutional representation in return; that was not a time of “community engagement” teams, corporate partnerships, and donations to local nonprofits in exchange for Board seats.
There was a lot not to like in that model, and a lot not to like in what the Conference did and how it did it, but underneath the layers of the Conference’s noblesse oblige and bias was a valuable and virtuous attitude about civic life and civic responsibility. To be a high profile company in Pittsburgh – then – was to take an active and visible role in the life of the region and to express that commitment via investing the time and expertise of the company’s leader.
The PG’s departure calls for a renewal of precisely that attitude. Modern corporate law and corporate governance say: investors, customers, and employees first; “the community” wins if the company profits; a “community engagement” team will take the baton of figuring out what the company owes the neighborhood. Anything more detracts from the bottom line. As the line from Ghostbusters goes, “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” I’m familiar with all of that. Before I became a law professor in Pittsburgh, I was a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley. I know how venture capitalists and investment bankers think. In Menlo Park, I know where they meet for coffee.
But what might be good for Pittsburgh’s industry today is not necessarily good for Pittsburgh.
Today, there are wanna-be Pittsburgh giants striding about the region, particularly in East Liberty, the Strip District, and Bakery Square. There are “unicorns” among Pittsburgh’s tech companies, and an “AI Strike Team” that is enthusiastically championing the idea that robotics and AI are central pillars of Pittsburgh’s prosperous future. Some of those companies are represented on the PBT’s Power 100 list (Aurora Innovation, Gecko, Lovelace AI, Abridge, Stack AV, Astrobotic, Duolingo) alongside long-time Pittsburgh businesses (including MSA Safety, Wabtec, Wesco, PNC, US Steel, K&L Gates, Reed Smith). Why not name names?
My question: which of those organizations will step up? Who’s in? Which of the CEOs of those companies will take their own time to sit down with their peers, in person, over time, and build a pool of money, leadership, and talent that staffs and sustains an institutional successor not simply to “the news hole” left by the vacating Post-Gazette but to the kind of central, broadly accessible cultural resource that a daily urban newspaper, at its best, provides?
The Allegheny Conference might even help this process move forward. Someone needs to coordinate and steer. Someone needs to provide a conference room and pastries.
I do not suppose that a tech CEO or a real estate developer or a hospital system executive knows anything about journalism. I do not want any of them running a key news operation. I do not necessarily want them to kick in their own money. I do want some of their time and attention. Their ambition. Their vision. Their strategic and operations knowledge. Their reach across sectors and across geographies. I do want their focus on a key civic priority, something that matters to their companies’ thriving and to their employees’ well-being because it matters to the region’s thriving, and vice versa.
Do I have suggestions and proposals for precisely what that time and attention should turn into, on the ground? Of course. But not here. Here, I’m sending up a flare. SOS. Pittsburgh needs you.
Can we rebuild it? Make it better than it was? Better, stronger, faster?
Having spent years in Pittsburgh talking with people here who run public sector organizations, private sector organizations, higher education systems, foundations – and also with people who run and work in small businesses, churches, and all sorts of other enterprises – I am asked occasionally: what is the paradigmatic example of sustained Pittsburgh ambition and excellence on a broad, global scale? The one institution in the region that consistently aims to be not simply the best here, or the best for here, but the best anywhere, period, full stop, and that gets criticized, sometimes mercilessly, when it falls short?
My answer: the Steelers.
Because that organization knows that its accountability is not simply to investors, employees, and (in this case) fans but instead to the community at large. I know a fair number of people who live in Pittsburgh and who are (surprisingly, to me) actively indifferent to whether the Steelers even exist, let alone whether they are playing or winning or losing. My point is both that the Steelers are there for them, too, and also that the Steelers as an organization seem to know that: the Steelers know that they provide a community resource, a unifying cultural force that binds Pittsburghers to one another even while we are divided in so many ways.
There was a time when daily journalism provided that sense of community identity, too. “The news,” to repeat myself, isn’t only about “what happens out there”; it’s what is happening with us. What a daily newspaper provides, whether in print or digital, whether via text or video or podcast or other, is more than “the news.” It is more than “accountability for politicians,” or restaurant reviews, or celebration of the arts, or brilliant cynics writing about sports. You need journalists to do those things. You need civic visionaries to bring the community together to build the institution. The end of the Post Gazette need not mean the end of Pittsburgh’s “civic sphere” or whatever we want to call the community of shared interest and identity that we call “Pittsburgh.”
Who’s in?
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