ALT Wednesday, January 7, 2026 Post-Gazette to Publish Final Edition and Cease Operations May 3, 2026 Block Communications, Inc. and the Block family are saddened to announce that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette plans to publish its final edition and cease operations on May 3, 2026. Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette. Despite those efforts, the realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable. Recent court decisions would require the Post-Gazette to operate under a 2014 labor contract that imposes on the Post-Gazette outdated and inflexible operational practices unsuited for today’s local journalism. We deeply regret the impact this decision will have on Pittsburgh and the surrounding region. The Block family is proud of the service the Post-Gazette has provided to Pittsburgh for nearly a century and will exit with their dignity intact.

ALT “This data belongs to all of us,” said Nsikan Akpan, the managing editor for Think Global Health. “We’ve already paid for this data, so taking it away, in some way, is robbing people of the information that they pay for in order to be informed and also to live.” The erasure of data on trans and gender-diverse people reflects the Trump administration’s anti-trans party line. And while the data may be restored, their current loss and any likely revision impacts journalists, and more importantly, the communities they serve, across their beats. “All these things could be back up online next week,” Akpan said. “But … a lot of them are being scrubbed of essential information and essential details. The people that are associated with these labels that they’re scrubbing still exist.”

ALT The move to strip trans and gender-diverse people from the nation’s public health and science data — along with minimizing other marginalized groups — also relies on exclusionary and harmful legacy media coverage. In the past, coverage from legacy media like the New York Times has been similarly used to justify anti-trans legislation, which has been growing year over year. “The trans community is part of who we are,” Blum said. “This administration is tending to pick off what they see as the most vulnerable, least powerful groups, so you start there [with data revision], but that doesn’t mean you stop there … You can sit around and say, ‘Well, that’s not my problem, but it is your problem.’”

ALT Petrin added that the data overhaul opens up questions about accountability journalism looking at data privacy, given the administration’s explicit anti-trans stance: “We collected a lot of information, and how is it now going to be used?” And now more than ever, Petrin said, it’s crucial for cis journalists to invest time and energy into learning how to report on trans communities accurately. “Often, if there is a trans reporter in a traditional newsroom, they’re the only person on their beat in that newsroom, if not the only person who is openly trans, you know, in, in that entire workplace,” they said. “And so a lot gets put on them, especially in times like this where everything that we are reporting on is so personally upsetting.”