Pittsburgh Post-Gazette photo via Wikimedia Commons. Edits by James Salanga.
On Oct. 5, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s appeal of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that compels them to pay what the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh’s lawyer said is $5 million to union journalists, exhausting the Post-Gazette’s last avenue of appeal.
The decision comes after six years of conflict between the Post-Gazette’s former management, Block Communications Inc., and their workers after the Post-Gazette illegally discarded the collectively-bargained union contract that covered their reporters’ healthcare benefits, as well as a narrowly-avoided newspaper shutdown and the longest-running labor strike in the U.S.
According to Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president and former Post-Gazette reporter Andrew Goldstein, the Supreme Court’s dismissal is “absolutely a victory.”
The Objective reached out to Block Communications Inc.’s attorneys for comment and did not receive a reply.
Since the Post-Gazette strike ended in November 2025, some formerly striking workers have gone on to other jobs or continued working at the paper, now owned by the nonprofit The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism. Others have started their own cooperative news site, The Pittsburgh Progress — a spiritual successor to the strike publication they operated during the historic strike, The Pittsburgh Union Progress.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette survives closure
The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh began their strike in 2022, accompanied by four other bargaining units, and the labor stoppage continued for three more years, until the newspaper’s union was the only unit remaining.
Only months after the strike ended in November 2025, Post-Gazette management announced the paper would be shutting down. Then, in May 2026, the millionaire-founded Venetoulis Institute — which also owns the burgeoning Baltimore Banner — acquired the paper in an asset sale.
After the acquisition, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., founder of the Venetoulis Institute, praised the paper’s former ownership for selling the paper at a discount, characterizing them as “civic-minded” and saying they “care about local news.”
The union condemned The Venetoulis Institute’s choice to “retain the leadership that executed an anti-union campaign deemed too indefensibly lawless by the Trump administration’s solicitor general.”
Still, Goldstein said the union tried to remain open-minded and hoped to protect as many jobs as they could in the transition while preserving the institutional knowledge of the paper’s staff.
But after The Venetoulis Institute commenced hiring and interviewed former reporters who expressed interest in continuing at the paper, they offered positions to only six of the former strikers, sparking criticism from the union and others. In totality, they retained only 60% of the former staff. Some of the reporters not offered positions had worked at the paper for decades. The Venetoulis Institute has recognized the union, though they have not yet established a new contract.
But the paper’s new owner has not publicly addressed what Goldstein called the Post-Gazette’s “ugly history” of racist and other bigoted coverage.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2018, the paper ran an op-ed that argued “calling someone a racist is the new McCarthyism." After suppressing political cartoons and firing a cartoonist critical of Donald Trump, the paper repeatedly ran misogynistic and racist cartoons, and endorsed Trump in 2020.
In 2020, the paper’s racism gained national attention when reporter Alexis Johnson was pulled off of covering the Black Lives Matter protests because of a tweet. Her white male colleague, Joshua Axelrod, was also reprimanded for his social media comments — but only Johnson, a Black woman, and Michael Santiago, a Black photojournalist, were told they couldn’t cover the protests.
The Venetoulis Institute was not available for comment prior to The Objective’s publication deadline.
Former strikers find new footing
While the court’s recompense may ease some of the reporters’ financial burdens, Goldstein says it doesn’t erase the years of sacrifice: striking reporters putting off their weddings, home renovations, or replacing their busted-up cars in order to survive.
Earlier this year, Natalie Duleba, secretary of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and one of the former strikers, had to pay for an emergency home repair and had to dip into “savings that my father left me after he died.” Duleba used to dogsit for supplemental income and because she “loves dogs,” but during the strike, that money went straight to her mortgage.
“It still feels like we deserve so much more,” said Goldstein.
Related: NewsGuild’s longest strike ends after historic court decision
Yet he and Duleba no longer work for the Post-Gazette. Neither of them were offered jobs by The Venetoulis Institute.
They and other former Post-Gazette reporters co-founded a different newsroom: The Pittsburgh Progress, led by veterans of the Post-Gazette and aiming to serve “every community in Pittsburgh.”
Duleba, also a founding member of the co-op, recalled repeated concerns about Post-Gazette coverage of Homestead, a majority-Black neighborhood: “I don’t know how many times we heard, ‘I’m sick of only hearing our neighborhood mentioned if there’s a violent crime.’”
She said the Progress is aiming to take a different approach, from intentionally choosing town hall locations to getting feedback from community leaders, because, in her words, “the people who know their neighborhoods best are the ones who live there.”
Madisyn Parisi is a trans journalist from Maryland and the writer behind The Backbone, a weekly newsletter dedicated to stories that hold powerful people accountable.
This piece was edited and copy edited by James Salanga.