Pittsburgh has lately embodied the harshest causes for concern about the state and future of baseball and broadsheets alike.
The Pirates are coming off seven consecutive losing seasons and struggling to draw five-digit crowds at each game. And whatever the news and mood around PNC Park, another Steel City institution has wondered if it will be there to help contextualize and immortalize any modest or magnitudinous moments for the long haul.
On April 14, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism confirmed it will assume custody of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The deal takes effect May 4, one day after the paper was slated to close down.
Ostensibly, Pirates beat writer Colin Beazley and any pinch-hitting colleagues can breathe easier. But this development’s finer points yield mixed messages.
Venetoulis is the organization that made The Baltimore Banner its first signature enterprise. Poynter Institute author Angela Fu, among others, noted that, despite its plus points, The Banner has yet to turn a profit.
Fu’s April 15 newsletter quoted an anonymous Venetoulis spokesperson as promising no Post-Gazette staffers are subject to layoffs. Yet Fu, the Nieman Lab’s Sophie Culpepper, and others highlighted Venetoulis chairman Stewart Bainum’s advisory to the Post-Gazette that its “current business model does not support the current size of the newsroom.”
Bainum even admitted in the paper’s own report by Kris B. Mamula that “we certainly don’t have all the answers.”
This all happened while Beazley and company covered a Pirates-Nationals series, where the other team’s marquee hometown paper has recently evoked a worst-case scenario that may still lurk.
In the three-plus months that the Post-Gazette’s perdition looked like a fait accompli, it made melancholy sense to those who have worked opposite its baseball scribes. The circumstances may have at least subconsciously braced them for any outcome.
Gordon Wittenmyer knows how fragile stability can be in this business. His 16-year run covering the Cubs ended three offseasons ago when NBC Sports Chicago cut his job. Today he chronicles the Reds for the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Through those two National League Central assignments, he has witnessed more of Pittsburgh’s situation than most other MLB reporters. Reached by Awful Announcing before the Post-Gazette’s meltdown was averted, he admitted that paper was looking wobbly for quite a while with its revolving door of Pirates correspondents.
Wittenmyer added, via email, that Pittsburgh’s paper of record was making lighter waves due to “the relative irrelevance of the Pirates in the last decade or so.”
Could the ballclub’s or any local team’s performance in the win-loss column and at the gate sway the Post-Gazette’s new owner’s commitment to coverage? Only time will tell.
But standings aside, writers are key to bolstering baseball’s public posture, as New York Daily News Mets reporter Abbey Mastracco stressed in an email to AA.
Masctracco also knows, having endured two layoffs herself, that no recovery is foolproof.
“We’re worried about the industry because if cuts like that can happen at the Post, they can happen anywhere,” she said.
That’s the Washington Post, which compounded 2026’s winter of discontent by dropping its whole, long-celebrated sports department. And while it has since enlisted Banner alum Danielle Allentuck to cover the Nationals, it hasn’t exactly restored its pre-February frame.
The shockwaves from the shutdown rattled Mastracco on multiple levels. A prestigious brand synonymous with exemplary intermarket colleagues had loudly quit the industry. It had ditched the District of Columbia’s sports readers.
But in her remarks to AA, Mastracco led off with the human element.
“I was more concerned with the financial future for the reporters affected,” she said, “especially since the jobs getting cut aren’t being replaced. Media companies seem hell-bent on proving we can do more with less without any sort of overall leadership or guidance at the top, just to be able to justify the financial moves they make that benefit everyone but the actual journalists doing the work and creating the product.”
Around the Beltway, there has been some cause for solace. Venetoulis has picked up some of the slack more broadly through The Banner, including former WaPo baseball writer Andrew Golden.
Meanwhile, then-incumbent Nationals beat reporter Spencer Nusbaum and predecessor Adam Kilgore (who had graduated to at-large, multi-sport assignments) are among a half-dozen WaPo discards now working at The Athletic. Chelsea Janes — who covered the Nats and then MLB in general for 12 years — is blogging and going on camera with Mets and Yankees reports for SNY.
These gale-force winds of change and their umpteen flare-ups have been hard to miss when covering and following any major sports league. But they’re especially acute in baseball.
This is the sport where press contingents see each other for days and games at a time. It’s where near-daily contests have consumers listening, watching, and reading more constantly.
It’s also a time-honored sport whose (hotly debated) prognostications of waning popularity resemble the doom-laden assessments of print journalism’s present and future.
Those crises, whatever their respective levels of urgency may be, are anything but unrelated. Sportswriters run their own circle of sustenance, reaping and relaying the dispatches that put the game and everything around it into thorough perspective.
The typist’s ink remains the lifeblood for everyone from their media siblings and cousins to their shared audience. That audience is key to continuing interest in the sport and, by extension, continued demand for sportswriting.
When covering any matchup, there is no substitute for being at the venue and collecting the information firsthand. Writers focused on one team can generally subsist on direct insights even in a less familiar lair.
Accordingly, Wittenmyer says of a reduced traveling press corps, “The biggest impact is just in the difference it makes to have a colleague’s eyes and ears in the other clubhouse postgame when we can’t be there because of our responsibilities in our own clubhouse.”
In Wittenmyer’s case, this snag is often offset by having a fellow Enquirer reporter on hand. Papers with this privilege can naturally split the duties with an ambassador along each baseline pre- and postgame.
But the keyword there is privilege. Mastracco reminds us that “a lot of papers are operating on skeleton crews, which means we can’t take days off when necessary.”
Imagine if baseball teams reduced or purged their bullpen or tried making a latter-day Cy Young out of their starting ace to save on salaries.
That’s essentially what papers do by shriveling their staffs. And with a game to cover virtually every day for six months plus spring training and potential playoffs, the toll is that much more palpable.
Overwork for writers and underwhelming investment by higher-ups dock the quality of the output. That hurts more than just morale among reporters and their readers’ experience.
Mastracco noted that out-of-town writers often enrich regional and national broadcasters with the insights that ensure an on-air pulse between pitches and plays.
Furthermore, since TV and radio outlets are exclusive to a team or league, objectivity is optional (discouraged?) in those sectors. While announcers and their real-time presentations play an indispensable role, writers who are free to find and tell the whole truth for people to digest more slowly are essential too.
Without reputable journalists representing publications like the Post-Gazette, how will Pittsburgh fans know what all the Pirates are doing (or not doing) to get competitive? How will they decide if the promise of a budding core group supporting Paul Skenes is more than a network’s obligatory optimism?
And what about the inconvenient beyond-the-game narratives that warrant scrutiny? Who is the best bet to break that glass besides the ever-present, ever-attuned, nonpartisan scribes?
When Bainum tells his new acquisition about the need to “thoughtfully address” its business snags, those are questions worth considering, even if it centers on the so-called toy department.
“At the end of the day, it’s the fans who miss out on coverage,” Mastracco said. “Are fans inclined to care if there is a lack of information? How will new fans be created?”
The absence of essential reportage has already hit the surface with the nation’s capital’s signature paper, however briefly, utterly ignoring its local team in America’s national pastime. Its extent of coverage by Allentuck, through no fault of her own, is still below WaPo’s one-time stellar stature. (“Told reporters” is a common attribution in her game stories.)
Those shortcomings lend the painful kind of reminder that writers and marquee employers thereof are vital to baseball’s long-term health.
However the sport’s suits adapt and enhance its product, and whatever teams do to retain or restore relevance, established and prospective fans need the whole unadulterated scoop. They need those important and interesting insights flowing firsthand on the pages and secondhand through the booth and talk-show mics.
If they can’t keep up, they might just give up.
“We’re worried about sports because if all fans have is betting and team social media accounts, then what is the future of fandom?” said Mastracco. “Will anyone care about consuming sports content in 10 to 20 years? And if not, what does that mean for our future?”