Several suburbs west of Pittsburgh likely will not have regular, ongoing coverage of their communities after the publisher of Gazette 2.0 announced that it was publishing its last issue on Thursday.
The Gazette published around 3,000 issues of a print paper every two weeks for the past six years. McKees Rocks, where the paper is based, has had more than 120 years of continuous newspaper coverage through this week. Gazette 2.0 began publishing soon after the 2017 closure of the Suburban Gazette, which was the modern name of a paper that was founded in 1892.
“People will be upset today that there's no newspaper in McKees Rocks and Stowe Township. But when they had a chance to support it, they didn't do enough to keep it going,” said Andrew Conte, who leads the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University and has written about the decline of other community media outlets in the area.
Sonja Reis, the owner and publisher, bought the paper for $1 three years ago after its founder, a local businessman, told her that, in addition to losing money, he didn’t like receiving complaints about stories. Reis has a more than 20-year career in journalism and it’s what she loves to do, she said.
But in the last three years she has lost $30,000 on the paper. She has a full time communications job for the McKees Rocks Community Development Corporation, in addition to work supervising the paper. She loved editing the paper on Friday nights but she got tired of dipping into her personal paycheck every month just to meet payroll.
“If I was independently wealthy and I could continue to throw ten grand a year, at this I would,” she said.
Reis worries that there won’t be a regular newspaper to cover important stories now, such as the Sto-Rox school district as it tries to claw itself out of financial trouble. The Gazette avoided writing about shootings and fires, Reis said, because that was about the only coverage the area receives from local TV stations, she said, other than the occasional feel-good story.
“This is now technically going to be a news desert,” Reis said.
There were multiple times when the paper lost advertising revenue because someone didn’t like a story that was written about them. For example, she said, the paper wrote a story about how some local politicians were receiving the majority of their political contributions from an outside developer.
“It needed to be reported,” she said. “Hey, look at this guy, is he getting sweetheart deals? Is he not? What’s going on?” she said.
Although the paper lost some money from that story, their watchdog reporting wasn’t the reason the paper’s financial situation didn’t work out, she said.
The paper’s monthly expenses are approximately $9,000, she said, which includes the cost of paying a reporter’s salary, freelancer stipends, equipment, the cost of printing and delivering the paper and other costs. She recently moved the staff remote, to save on rent.
The paper would only bring in enough revenue to meet their expenses four or five months a year, she said. The majority of the revenue came from advertising from a few devoted local businesses in McKees Rocks, Stowe and Kennedy. The paper also covered stories in Carnegie, Coraopolis, Crafton, Ingram, Moon, Neville and Robinson.
The paper had about 350 – 400 subscribers, who paid $38 for a yearly subscription, Reis said.
“The margin between success and failure is really thin for a community newspaper like that,” Conte said.
Reis will miss editing the paper on Friday nights. And she will miss the people, even though she couldn’t pay them enough. “I felt like it was more a training ground, a place for young people who were really interested in the business to learn,” she said.
Several of the paper’s staff and former staff wrote farewell tributes for the final edition. Reis said she will continue to pay for the website, so that the stories from the last six years don’t just disappear. The paper is holding a farewell wake that is open to the public on November 2 from 6 - 8 p.m. at 701 Yunker St in McKees Rocks.
Editor's note: The writer of this piece collaborated on two pieces with the Gazette 2.0 prior to working at WESA; he was never employed by or paid by the Gazette 2.0.
