The owners of The Blade are looking to sell the Toledo newspaper and said Tuesday that if they’re unsuccessful, both the print and digital versions of the paper will stop publishing at the end of the year.
Block Communications similarly cited financial losses when it announced in January that it would cease publishing another newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But about two weeks before it was to shut down in May, Block announced that the nonprofit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism would buy the newspaper and keep it open.
Block announced the Blade news in an email to the paper’s staff, with president and chief operating officer Jodi Miehls calling it “an extremely difficult decision.”
“The Block Family’s continued investment to keep the Blade open is no longer an option. The financial losses the Blade has endured for years are simply not sustainable,” she wrote, according to the newspaper.
A team of reporters from the Blade won the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 2004 for articles about an elite Army platoon accused of killing unarmed Vietnamese civilians in 1967. Reporters at the newspaper also were finalists for the prestigious journalism award in 2000, again for investigative reporting, and in 2006 in the public service category.
Among the newspaper’s alums was Mildred Wirt Benson, better known to legions of Nancy Drew fans as Carolyn Keene, the original author of the mystery books featuring the plucky amateur detective.
The Blade was founded in 1835 — two years before Toledo was officially incorporated as a city — and says it is the city’s oldest continually operating business. Paul Block Sr., a newspaper mogul, took over the paper in August 1926.
An advertisement printed the day after Block was introduced to the newspaper staff said the date “will long be remembered by us as the beginning of a new era of good will in our association with the Toledo Blade,” along with a list of all of the newspaper’s employees, according to the paper.
“Block Communications Board of Directors and the Block Family are truly disappointed to have reached this point,” Miehls said in Tuesday’s email, just over a hundred years later. “Unfortunately, the realities facing local journalism have left us in this situation.”