The publisher of a highly regarded nonprofit digital news outlet based in Baltimore announced Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire the assets of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ending nearly a century of family control of the newspaper and ensuring the future of Western Pennsylvania’s largest news organization.

Toledo, Ohio-based Block Communications Inc. is selling the Post-Gazette assets to the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Banner. The newsroom and local business leadership will remain in Pittsburgh while other functions, including technology and business operations, will be combined with teams at the Venetoulis Institute.

The sale becomes effective May 4 and the Post-Gazette name will be unchanged. The Post-Gazette, one of the country’s oldest newspapers with roots dating back more than two centuries, was scheduled to cease operations on May 3.

The new owners said they plan to maintain the Post-Gazette’s two print publication days, Thursday and Sunday.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As part of the transaction, Post-Gazette Executive Editor Emeritus David Shribman will join the Venetoulis board. Previously, he was assistant managing editor of the Boston Globe and politics correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Most recently, Shribman served as the Post-Gazette’s executive editor from 2003 to 2018.

“The Block family has worked to find the best possible source for responsible local journalism for the Pittsburgh region and we believe we have succeeded,” Karen Johnese, chair of Block Communications, the Post-Gazette’s Toledo, Ohio-based corporate parent, said in a prepared release. “We are excited to hand our treasured paper over to such a committed and creative organization.

“We trust in their integrity and care for our community.”

The purchase marks an ambitious expansion of Maryland hotel magnate and philanthropist Stewart W. Bainum Jr.’s effort to bolster local journalism through the Venetoulis Institute that he founded and named after his late friend, Theodore “Ted” Venetoulis. Venetoulis was a former Baltimore County executive, civic leader and advocate of local journalism who died in 2021.

“We aspire to build a culture that’s transparent, collaborative and ambitious and has a sense of urgency and respects everybody,” Bainum said in an interview Saturday. “The test is not whether you’re for-profit or nonprofit, but whether you’re providing high quality journalism to communities that need it most.”

The Venetoulis Institute has crafted a model that aims to support strong local journalism while also establishing economic sustainability at a time when legacy media outlets are struggling. Less than three years after launching in 2022, the Banner won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, and now has 79,500 paid subscribers and 4.1 million average monthly page views, tracking its rapid growth.

The Bainum family had achieved success in philanthropic efforts to reduce syphilis and HIV among pregnant women in sub-Sarahan Africa, when they decided to shift their charitable focus to other needs, Bainum said.

“Is there a solution to local news in this country?” Bainum said he asked in 2020. “Polarization keeps going up; understanding in the community is going down. People on one side of town aren’t hearing what people on the other side of town are saying.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute: let’s do a startup, a sustainable business model at scale that could be replicated across the country,’ ” he said.

Launch of the Banner followed in 2022.

The Banner’s newsroom has grown significantly since then, and Bob Cohn, the Banner’s chief executive officer, and Audrey Cooper, editor-in-chief, now oversee a newsroom of about 95 staffers, reflecting its expanded role in the community.

The Post-Gazette newsroom currently stands around 100. The new iteration of the PG going forward might need to start out smaller, Bainum said.

“The Post-Gazette’s current business model does not support the size of the current newsroom,” he said. “We’re going to have to thoughtfully address that.

“We’re learning as we go, so we certainly don’t have all the answers,” he said.

The Banner’s 2025 Pulitzer was awarded for a multi-year investigative series — in collaboration with a New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship — that focused on Baltimore’s fentanyl/overdose crisis. The series involved two years of reporting, including suing for public records regarding autopsy data on drug deaths from the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The sale of the Post-Gazette, the state’s second largest newspaper, is the latest example of the rise of nonprofit journalism as a business model for media platforms, both in Pittsburgh and across the state and country. The state’s largest newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, is owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute.

These outlets rely on advertising revenue and subscriptions, but add philanthropy as the “third leg of the stool” to support operations, Cohn said.

“Nonprofit journalism has been kind of snowballing for the past 10 years or so,” he said. “That’s helped fill a lot of news gaps across the country.

“Our model is very much based on traditional revenue sources from advertising and subscriptions, but some newer things, like events and philanthropic donations, which really is new.”

“Advertising is very much an important part of the puzzle, the second biggest driver of revenue after subscriptions,” Cohn said.

The Banner has not yet broken even.

Readers can continue to expect timely, fair and accurate reporting from the Post-Gazette, Cohn said. The Venetoulis board will have no impact on editorial decisions, which will be controlled locally.

“For readers, being a nonprofit signals we are committed to independent, trusted reporting — the truth,” he said. “Editorial content is not at all affected.”

One change that readers will see: while aggressive and thorough Post-Gazette coverage of elections will continue, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit under the Internal Revenue Service code, the Venetoulis Institute and therefore the Post-Gazette will be prohibited from endorsing or opposing candidates for office.

Venetoulis Institute founder Bainum served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1979 to 1982 and the state Senate from 1983 to 1986. His legislative work earned awards from environmental advocates and the national governmental accountability group Common Cause.

Bainum, who also chairs the Venetoulis Institute, has held leadership positions at Manor Care Inc., a nursing home chain founded by his father. He served as Manor Care chairman and CEO between 1987 and 1998, and since 1997, he has been chairman of Rockville, Md.-based Choice Hotels International.

Choice Hotels is among the world’s biggest hotel franchisors, with more than 7,000 hotels in 40 countries and territories operating under Comfort Inn, Cambria Hotels and other brands.

Bainum seeded the Banner with a $50 million investment that was intended to provide a five-year runway. In September, the Banner expanded into the Washington, D.C. suburbs with the opening of a news bureau in Montgomery County, Maryland’s most populous county. The Banner also has reporters in neighboring Howard and Anne Arundel counties, and recently announced plans to enter Prince George’s County.

In addition, the Banner expanded its sports coverage in February after the Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff, a downsizing that included closing the newspaper’s sports department.

The sale of the Post-Gazette ends an era of Block family ownership of the newspaper that started with Paul Block, who founded what became Block Communications around 1900. The Blocks created the Post-Gazette in 1927 after acquiring existing newspapers in the city. It became one of the family’s flagship properties alongside the Blade of Toledo.

The Post-Gazette traces its Pittsburgh roots to 1786 as the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Block Communications Inc. is the corporate parent of the Post-Gazette, and its CEO Allan Block said the newspaper sale was a bittersweet moment.

“It was like part of me being torn away,” he said Saturday. “We were good stewards, we did a good job. I’m proud of what we did there.”

Bainum praised the Blocks for their long commitment to journalism.

“The Block family should be recognized for selling the Post-Gazette at a huge discount to the price they could’ve received,” he said. “I don’t know how many families would’ve done that.

“They care about local news and they’re civic minded,” he said.

In 1992, Block Communications purchased the Pittsburgh Press from E.W. Scripps Co. during a strike by Teamsters, absorbing some of its editorial staff and operations into the Post-Gazette. The Teamsters also led a walkout at the Post-Gazette in 2022 over a change in health insurance plans that shifted a bigger share of premium costs to employees from the company.

A segment of the newsroom’s reporters, photographers and other editorial department employees, members of the Newspaper Guild, joined the Teamsters in a rancorous strike lasting three years.

A majority of the newsroom’s editorial employees resigned from the Guild and continued to publish online and print editions of the newspaper. The strikers returned to work in November 2025.

A fixture in the region for generations, the Post-Gazette has kept Pittsburghers abreast of world and local events — from World War II to the 1969 lunar landing, from the Steelers’ six Super Bowl wins, the Penguins’ five Stanley Cup victories to the killing of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill in 2018. The newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize a year later for reporting on the shootings, the Post-Gazette’s third Pulitzer since 1938.

Since 2020, the Post-Gazette has been a Pulitzer finalist twice while also winning a large number of national and state awards. It has won the state’s News Organization of the Year award for four straight years, 2022 through 2025.

In January, BCI announced that it would close the newspaper May 3, the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the company’s appeal for a stay of a lower court order requiring the Post-Gazette to restore employee health insurance coverage that was in effect in 2017.

Like virtually every other business, the Post-Gazette has faced spiraling employee health care costs, which the newspaper addressed in 2020 by implementing a high-deductible plan. But a federal court ruling in November instead ordered the Post-Gazette to restore the higher cost health care benefits for employees that were in effect in 2017.

The order favored the National Labor Relations Board and Newspaper Guild, but made continued operation of the Post-Gazette untenable, Allan Block said. The newspaper had “essentially been underwater for the last 20 years,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with the union, but there’s something wrong with not understanding basic economic reality,” he said. “It’s not the end of Block Communications, but we will miss Pittsburgh.”

BCI will continue to publish the Toledo Blade along with running other media-related businesses, including cable and broadband services.

Cohn said he was familiar with the Post-Gazette’s recent labor strife.

“We are aware of the history and importance of these issues at the newspaper, and our approach is to treat everyone with dignity and fairness and work toward solutions that both support journalism and the long-term sustainability of the Post-Gazette,” he said.

Buffeted by market pressures and changes in reader habits in sourcing news, the U.S. has lost more than 3,200 newspapers since 2005, more than 130 newspapers between 2024 and 2025 alone, according to the Local News Initiative at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At the same time digital-only new sites like the Banner have been multiplying, even thriving, a 2025 report found.

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