The Tribune-Review Ends Its Print Edition November 30.

Politics aside, this is in the end a story about people, pay checks and paying the bills.

Lotsa people far far removed from la follia Scaife will now have to find some other way of putting food on their respective tables - and that's nothing to cheer about.

From the P-G:

Trib Total Media today said it will stop publishing a print edition of its Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper Dec. 1 and will lay off 106 workers as it continues to downsize its print operations and beef up its digital products.

The North Shore-based company also said it will consolidate its printing operations at a facility in Tarentum.

Bad news all around.  Which is interesting because if you look at the Trib coverage of its own downsizing, a slightly, shall we say, different picture is being presented:

Trib Total Media announced Wednesday a broad-based restructuring plan that will re-emphasize local news in its key markets while moving toward the future with its Allegheny County news coverage.

In an announcement to employees, President and CEO Jennifer Bertetto said that to ensure a sustainable future the company will significantly increase staff and other resources devoted to the Westmoreland and Valley News Dispatch editions of the Tribune-Review. She said the goal is to bolster the local news and sports coverage that have made those newspapers so successful.

By the way, the headline reads:

Trib announces expansion in some markets, going all-digital in Pittsburgh

Oh, so it's an expansion! I get it - that's why 106 workers will be laid off.

Huh.

Over at the City Paper, Dennis Roddy has some insight into the workings of the Trib:

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was conceived in a fit of pique, when Richard Mellon Scaife was blocked from purchasing The Pittsburgh Press at the end of the strike that killed the latter paper. An angry billionaire can be an entertaining spectacle, but a disruptive one. The plain fact is that Dick Scaife hated the Block family. That is why there was a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The problem with The Tribune-Review was that it wished its stories to be true. Often they were. In the case of reporters such as Carl Prine, Andrew Conte and its renowned state-capital correspondent, Brad Bumsted, the stories were not only true but excellent. In the 24 years of its existence, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review broke important stories and in the past decade it frequently embarrassed its more established crosstown rival, the Post-Gazette.

This is how the work of legitimate reporters ran in the same paper that carried the overwrought conspiracy theories of Christopher Ruddy, who made the Trib famous for outlandish suggestions that Clinton aides Vince Foster and Ron Brown were murdered. The editorial page became a fetid sinkhole of hate and stupidity.

My own work here at this blog can attest to the stupidity of the editorial page (just search for Trib and climate and you'll know what I mean).  Though this is NO criticism of this column, what Dennis leaves out are the many times the editorial page quoted/sourced/referenced the very conservative think tanks their boss funded with Scaife money - all without a peep about the common financial entanglements enveloping each.

While I'm not at all cheering those hundred+ people now out of work (and who could?) I am gratified, I suppose, to know that with the Trib downsizing teh crazie they promote will downsize as well.