Jay Aldridge still flinches when he comes across a newspaper reference to that "old steel town."

And, "the McBeam thing," he said, "is just more of the same."

Steely McBeam is the new Steelers mascot, a square-jawed representation of a 1950s-era mill worker, with hard hat, overalls and heavy eyebrows. To Mr. Aldridge, a man formerly responsible for marketing the Pittsburgh area to prospective businesses around the country and overseas, Steely McBeam reinforces an outdated image of our town, just as the Steelers do. Mr. Aldridge once joked to The Washington Post that if Pittsburgh really wanted to shed its Steel City label the name of its football team should change to "the Pittsburgh Softwares."

"There is dignity to the past, no question about it," said Mr. Aldridge, former president of the Penn's Southwest Association, "but from a marketing standpoint we still have to think of the future and what we want the area to become."

The emergence of Steely McBeam once again raises the tricky question of how to market Pittsburgh in a post-industrial age. For the past three decades, as the area lived through a manufacturing decline that was as severe as that of any metropolitan area in the country, local officials attached themselves to slogans and advertisements designed to focus attention away from steel, away from the image of Pittsburgh as a single-industry community where the street lamps burned through smoke night and day. Recent examples include "Roboburgh" and "Knowledge Town," the latter applied by President Bush after a 2002 visit to a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center lab.

Because the Steelers receive so much national exposure, there have been attempts to alter the substance of information delivered during games. Prior to the NFL playoffs in 2001, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a business booster group, tried to persuade broadcasters at CBS not to show the typical fire-and-ash images and concentrate their cameras and commentary on other aspects of Pittsburgh's economy -- a strategy that backfired when U.S. Steel Corp. objected to the concept of distancing Pittsburgh from steel.

In 2003, a new marketing effort led by an "Image Gap Committee" once again danced around the industrial iconography when it recommended local organizations keep "heritage imagery" to a minimum and instead promote images that "tie heritage to innovation and transformation," noting that "not all historic photography is good." A current campaign tied to the city's 250th anniversary in 2008 emphasizes Pittsburgh as a "center of innovation" and a place where science, technology, arts and outdoor recreation are paramount. The tagline is "Imagine what you can do here" and a video running at www.imaginepittsburgh.com omits any references to the past beyond the French and Indian War waged here in the 1750s. As part of the 250th campaign, Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania is asking for multimedia proposals designed to "frame" the Pittsburgh region and "re-imagine and re-build its place amidst hope, pride and enthusiasm." The winner will receive as much as $45,000 in funding.

The leader of the 250th marketing campaign, Marc USA President Michele Fabrizi, has no problem with Steely McBeam or the image he represents. "If I was marketing the Steelers," she said, "I would do the same thing. They are the Steelers and that is our heritage, and there is nothing embarrassing about that. That is how we built our city."

At the same time, the advertising executive acknowledges that "what we need to do is focus on what the community is about today." All new marketing messages, she said, need to remind people about the "industries that are growing and having such an impact on our world today . . . our national and international image has to be something more than an old steel city. We want people who have known us in the past to look at us today."

U.S. Steel, she added, is "100 percent behind the campaign" and will be running an ad to support it.

The recent introduction of Steely McBeam generated no debate or discussion inside the image-conscious Allegheny Conference, according to spokesman Shawn Bannon. But he admits there is a "fine line" that exists when discussing Pittsburgh's legacy as the Steel City. "We are absolutely proud of the industrial heritage of the region," he said. "We remain a global center for advanced materials manufacturing. We are very proud of that. At the same time, when it comes to our national and international profile, we want to be seen as a region that has a more diverse economy, not just the Steel City."

At VisitPittsburgh, the nonprofit organization charged with recruiting conventions and tourists, spokeswoman Beverly Morrow-Jones views Steely McBeam as a "hunk" and a "strong representation of our team," she said. "It's great and it's fun and we will have fun promoting it." The Steelers name "is never going to go away. We work with it. What we do is bring people here so they can see [the city] for themselves," citing several press tours that resulted in positive stories in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Baltimore Sun.

Those recommending Pittsburgh strike a compromise between the old and the new point to the "Networks of Steel" ad campaign of the late 1990s for Marshall high-tech firm Fore Systems. It featured the slogan: "We're from Pittsburgh. We build networks that last" -- the motto embossed on a steel plate next to the photo of a bare-chested riveter. John Athorn, the New York advertising executive who created the ad, said yesterday that he noticed an "apprehensiveness in embracing that part of Pittsburgh -- the steelworker." But that image, he said, remains an appropriate image for this town: "You can't run from it. It is who you are and it is in your DNA. When deployed appropriately, it is a smart way to market certain aspects of Pittsburgh. You can't deny it's unique to the area."