A Quick Disclaimer: Backstory & Strategy is a personal, independent publication. The views, analysis, and commentary expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent the official position, strategy, or endorsement of the American Press Institute, its leadership, or its board. This is my personal space for analyzing the media landscape, testing new frameworks, and thinking out loud.
A further note, since it’s relevant here: API ran an Inclusion Index cohort involving five Pittsburgh newsrooms, including the Post-Gazette, and separately supports a Community Advisory Committee connecting residents with local newsrooms in the city. I’m not involved in either program, and this piece doesn’t speak for them — but it seemed worth naming upfront, given how directly some of what follows touches this newsroom.
In April, I asked what exactly had been saved when the Venetoulis Institute bought the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A masthead survived. A brand survived. A very expensive runway got built.
Five months on, the more interesting question is where it leads.
On August 24, the Post-Gazette announced that executive editor Stan Wischnowski (whom I have fond memories of working with during my stint at Philly.com) will step down in late September after six years. It was his decision. He told Venetoulis a few weeks earlier that he believed the newsroom was in a strong position and that it was time for something new. Institute leaders called him “a beacon of stability,” and the description fits. He arrived in 2020 with a pandemic underway and a labor dispute that became a three-year strike, and he shepherded the handoff to nonprofit ownership in May.
I’d like to take him at his word about where the newsroom stands, and I don’t have any reason not to.
What I keep coming back to is something separate: the Post-Gazette doesn’t publish readership, revenue, or retention numbers the way a public company would. That’s true of Stan’s tenure, and it’ll be true of his successor’s, regardless of who’s right about where things stand today. So instead of grading the present, this piece is about what gets built next — and what a newsroom like this could start showing us, so “strong position” is something we can eventually see for ourselves, not just hear.
The seat Stan is leaving isn’t the one he took in 2020, and that’s true through no fault of his. In May, the ownership changed, the staff size changed, and the reporting lines changed. The next executive editor inherits a different job than the one he had: the first draft of a nonprofit civic institution, with a smaller staff, a philanthropy strategy, an editorial director in Baltimore, and a city that will judge all of it against 240 years of history.
That’s a different job, and a search is underway to fill it. So here’s my first draft of the job description.
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1. Someone who builds for the community, not just about it
The real question for a smaller newsroom is what it owes the people who read it. My answer is that journalism often stops one step short of being useful. When a school board votes to close a building, the story is the vote. The product is what a parent needs to do before the enrollment deadline. Most newsrooms do the first well and skip the second.
The next editor should run the newsroom more like a product organization. The craft is clearly here: the Post-Gazette was a Pulitzer finalist in 2024 for editorial writing on the city’s homeless services, and it shared a George Polk Award in 2023 with ProPublica for an investigation into faulty breathing machines. The open question is whether that craft reaches people in a form they can act on.
It also means choosing, and choosing well means partnering. A smaller newsroom can’t cover everything, and it shouldn’t try. Regional politics and state government, health and higher education, civic accountability, and the sports teams that anchor local identity are my guesses at the three or four franchises worth owning completely. Reasonable people would choose differently.
For everything else, ask who covers it best. TribLive, the digital arm of Trib Total Media, is the region's largest newsroom and never stopped publishing through the Post-Gazette's decline — any honest accounting of "who covers Pittsburgh" starts there, not with the Post-Gazette. PublicSource has been doing investigative and community reporting since 2011, WESA runs a daily public radio operation, and the New Pittsburgh Courier and a range of neighborhood outlets are closer to some communities than any single metro daily can be. More than 40 Pittsburgh-area outlets already work together through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. The point is to choose out loud, and to say who's picking up the rest.
And since the nonprofit structure bars the paper from endorsing candidates, the editor will need to say what the paper’s voice does instead.
2. Someone who uses technology on purpose
Few cities are better placed than Pittsburgh for a newsroom to think seriously about AI. Carnegie Mellon is one of the country’s leading AI research institutions, and a growing collaborative reporting effort by Technical.ly, City Cast Pittsburgh, and PublicSource is already covering how the region is governing the technology. A newsroom in that city that treats AI as somebody else’s beat has missed its position.
The challenges come first, and there are three.
Who is reading the archive, and on what terms? On September 21, I ran the free AI Readiness Check on post-gazette.com. I built the tool, so weigh that accordingly, and a public scan can’t see private agreements. It found none of the 14 known AI training crawlers blocked, no public AI policy page, and no formal rights reservation. There is an llms.txt file, which helps AI systems find the site’s content, but no public statement of how that content may be used.
🔍 Check your own site. Run the free AI Readiness Check on any newsroom’s homepage — no login required. It takes about a minute and tells you exactly which AI crawlers are reading your work, and on what terms.
Trust, inside and out. After May, any mention of AI in a smaller newsroom will be heard as a replacement plan. So say plainly what AI will and won’t be used for, publish it, and name a human accountable for the output.
Independence. Carnegie Mellon also does significant funded work with state government and large foundations, including a $55 million Gates Foundation investment this year in Learnvia, an AI-enabled learning nonprofit CMU launched. Any partnership needs disclosure rules written down before it begins.
Now the opportunities, which I think are larger: a trusted place for residents to ask AI questions, a genuine accountability beat on how employers and agencies deploy the technology, and a research partnership with CMU’s labs that a smaller newsroom could never build alone — and could share with the rest of the ecosystem.
3. Someone who scales across, not up
CEO Bob Cohn has said the Institute expects marketing, HR, product, technology, and finance to sit under shared leadership serving both Baltimore and Pittsburgh, with dedicated newsrooms, advertising and events teams, and brand marketing staying local to each market. That’s a reasonable sketch, and it matters because of the distinction I drew in April: scaling up means a franchise, scaling across means shared plumbing with local proximity. Local news wants to be a utility more than a franchise.
The next editor’s opportunity is to turn that sketch into something specific and public.
4. Someone who strengthens the ecosystem and the people in it
Pittsburgh has more than 40 credible news outlets, and a foundation community that has invested in supporting them. The Post-Gazette is now a nonprofit competing for some of the same dollars.
That ecosystem thinking isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t something the Post-Gazette would be inventing. Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation built the Pittsburgh Media Partnership that made this level of collaboration possible in the first place. TribLive, the region’s largest newsroom, is one of its members, and this year seeded Newsworks Lab, its own standalone investigative newsroom, with $1.25 million. The Post-Gazette doesn’t need a new model. It needs to decide whether it’s going to participate seriously in the one Pittsburgh already built.
Make it a dividend by making the partnerships real: share tools and distribution, regrant a share of locally raised philanthropy, and build the municipal desk with partners, since Allegheny County has 130 municipalities and no single newsroom will cover them.
Then there’s the hardest requirement, which is trust with people. The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh spent 1,133 days on strike and won in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the paper had bargained in bad faith and ordered it to compensate workers. But because the sale was structured as an asset purchase, that debt remained Block Communications’ obligation, not the Institute’s — the union has said Block still owes its former employees several million dollars. To its credit, the Institute told the Guild it would recognize the union and looked forward to bargaining a new contract.
Whatever is settled at the table, the next editor will lead a newsroom that includes people who crossed the picket line, people who didn’t, and people who lost their jobs in May. A credible editor will say plainly what a fair rebuild looks like and hold to it.
💬 What am I missing? If you know Pittsburgh media better than I do — leave a comment below. I read every one, and I’ll fold real answers into a follow-up.
5. Someone who defines success in public
The numbers make the case for why this matters. The Institute’s most recent tax filing shows $27.3 million in revenue against $28.8 million in expenses, a loss of about $1.5 million, and Bainum’s $30 million Pittsburgh pledge runs over five years or until the organization breaks even, whichever comes first. The Banner, further along, hasn’t yet broken even either.
And show the receipts. Awards are receipts for the newsroom. The community needs receipts for itself.
To whoever takes the chair, here’s the scoreboard I’d plant.
In your first 90 days, publish:
The front door. Some of this already exists but isn’t easy to find — the Post-Gazette’s corrections policy, for instance, lives in its online style book, but a scan of the current site struggled to surface standards, corrections, or staff information in one obvious place. Consolidating it is a week-one announcement, and a small, immediate way to close the trust gap this piece keeps coming back to.
An AI posture, whatever it is: blocked, licensed, or open on purpose.
A definition of “sustainable,” with a ceiling on any single donor and a date.
By month 12, and again at month 36, report:
The ecosystem: dollars regranted or shared with other Pittsburgh outlets.
The newsroom: retention and staffing compared with the pre-May newsroom.
The outcomes: an annual ledger of what changed because of the reporting.
📊 Free tools mentioned in this piece: NewsGrade audits a newsroom’s site against 70+ journalism best-practice criteria (trust signals, SEO, accessibility). AI Readiness Check audits AI crawler exposure and licensing signals. Both are free, no login required, built by me on my own time.
What I’d retire from the pitch
I’ve written before about the “only you can save journalism” appeal, which goes back to public media’s pledge drives of the 1970s. The Post-Gazette shouldn’t run on rescue language. Ask funders to buy outcomes.
Stan Wischnowski held the newsroom together through the hardest stretch in its modern history. The next editor decides what gets built on the runway he left behind.
To whoever takes the chair: everything on that list starts from a baseline you inherited, and every improvement will be yours. Publish the scoreboard early, and you plant a stake no one else can move. I hope the search finds someone who wants the job. I’ll be one of the first to read the scoreboard.
Your turn
That’s a first draft, and I’m not the only person with standing to write this ad. If you run a newsroom in the region, cover Pittsburgh media, teach journalism here, fund local news, or read the paper every morning — what would you put in the job description? What did I miss?
Tell me in the comments, or publish your own version and send it my way, and I’ll link to it.
Related: The Teshuva Test