• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 15, 2016

Just how much money are newspapers losing? While it may not be representative of the entire industry, at least in one case, owning newspapers cost one family almost a cool half-billion. Holy moly!

According to court filings from a legal battle over the estate of former newspaper publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who owned the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and several other local newspapers in Pennsylvania, the businesses managed to suck up a family fortune of $450 million over the course of decades.

Rival newspaper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette first reported the news, not without a certain amount of glee.

In a court statements cited by the Post-Gazette, an attorney for one of the Scaife family members declares: “The Tribune-Review is probably losing an order of magnitude of $10 million in the early years.”

That apparently refers to the period after Scaife first acquired the Tribune-Review in 1970. However losses mounted rapidly: “That went from $10 million to $70 million in those later years.”

Much of the money was disbursed to the newspapers from a family trust fund.

The lawsuit was brought by Scaife’s son and daughter against three trustees who oversaw the fund and acquiesced to Scaife’s plans over the years. One of Scaife’s main motivations in continuing to publisher the Tribune-Review was his feud with the owners of the Post-Gazette, suggesting the decision to dump half a billion into money-losing enterprises was perhaps not entirely rational.

Recently, Tribune-Review publisher Trib Total Media announced restructuring plans including merging The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review with two other regional newspapers to form a new publication known simply as the Tribune-Review. The company laid off 153 staffers as part of the transition.

On a more positive note, elsewhere in Pennsylvania, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, the owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, has bowed to financial realities and put the newspapers under the control of a nonprofit organization.

The newspaper publisher Philadelphia Media Network will continue to operate as a for-profit company but will be taken over by a nonprofit called the Institute for Journalism and New Media, which is receiving a $20 million donation from Lenfest as an endowment.

Lenfest received sole country of the newspaper publisher after his business partner, Lewis Katz, died in a small plane crash in 2014. The two had just won control of the company in an auction following tortuous bankruptcy proceedings.