Categories: OLD Media Moves

Two Pittsburgh biz journalists start newspaper with buyout money

Ann Belser, former business reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the newspaper’s former business editor Bryan Hyslop have started a newspaper for neighborhoods in the city’s East End called Print.

Kim Lyons of Next Pittsburgh writes, “Belser and Print editor Brian Hyslop, former Post-Gazette business editor, had been thinking about launching a community newspaper for a while, perhaps post-retirement [Full disclosure: Belser was my colleague and Hyslop was my editor for part of my tenure at the Post-Gazette]. But when the Post-Gazette offered buyouts to employees last fall, the two decided it was time. So the buyout money from their former newspaper is helping fund Print.

“The pair enlisted former PG colleagues Anita Dufalla to design pages and Elwin Green, founding editor of Homewood Nation, for coverage in that neighborhood. They have coworking space in the Beauty Shoppe in East Liberty.“Print relies on a news service for puzzles and feature content, and local freelance writers and photographers for the rest. All contributors are paid, Belser says.

“‘When we tell people what we’re doing, the universal reaction is ‘Oh I had a paper like that when I was growing up,” Hyslop says. ‘There’s an emotional connection to the small-town newspaper.’

“Print‘s editor and publisher believe they can build on that nostalgia in the East End while providing something that serves the community. As they say in the About section of their website, ‘Print reflects our faith in the era in which newspapers arrived at your door and you could clip out and post proudly the articles about your kids or business.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.