Editorial pages for Blade, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette merge

John Robinson Block, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has announced that the editorial pages for the two newspapers will merge into one entity and that Keith C. Burris, currently the editor of the editorial pages for The Blade, will have charge of the overall operation.

Mr. Burris’s title is editor, vice president, and editorial director for Block Newspapers.

Keith Burris, editor, vice president, and editorial director for Block newspapers.

Mr. Burris, 63, has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has written widely on politics, government, culture, and the arts for publications including the New York Times. But his first experience writing editorials and opinion essays was at the Post-Gazette when he was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.

He worked in the editorial department at The Blade in the 1980s.

Mr. Burris also worked for the Hartford Courant and Winston-Salem Journal. For 21 years, he was editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

While there, Mr. Burris won the Allen B. Rogers Award for the best single editorial, in any newspaper, regardless of size, in New England in a single year. The award was judged by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard.

He also is the author of Deep River: The Life and Music of Robert Shaw and the editor of No-Fault Politics by the late Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy.

Mr. Burris holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, where his primary focus was political philosophy.

He has taught at a number of American colleges and universities. He was a member of the faculty at Washington & Jefferson College and, while there, wrote a monthly column for the Post-Gazette, as well as a weekly column for the Washington Observer Reporter.

He has also taught at West Virginia University, Penn State, and Trinity College, in Hartford.

Mr. Burris and his wife, Amy, an artist and teacher, have three grown children: Alexander, Sophia, and William.