Tony Grossi has been on the sidelines since the Plain Dealer pulled him from the Browns beat after Grossi's inadvertent tweet insulting Browns owner Randy Lerner.
He was "reassigned" in the sports department.
But he never had another byline in the paper, though he was still active on Twitter, before his resignation yesterday from the paper he had worked at for 30 years.
WKYC, Cleveland Frowns, and the News-Herald all report that Grossi was hired by WKNR as the station's Browns beat reporter. Speculation so far says he'll have a heavy web presence on the ESPN Cleveland site, but won't have his own show.
Romenesko reached Grossi for comment, the first such public remarks from the reporter. Here's what he had to say. (Tease: he takes a jab at Reader Rep Ted Diadiun on the way out.)
I was fortunate to have an extraordinary career opportunity come my way at about the same time the Plain Dealer saw fit to “reassign” me. The timing was simultaneous and crazily coincidental. I can’t confirm what I’ll be doing and where at this time. But I will say it is so compellingly good that I would have leapt at it regardless of what happened at the PD. It will allow me to grow professionally in ways that are not possible in the newspaper business.I want to take issue with something said by the PD ombudsman in one of your previous posts. He said at the time he got fewer responses about my “reassignment” than when the paper pulled a comic strip. All I will say is that person never wrote anything in his career that generated anywhere near the volume of mail that his company line column about me received. And 90 percent of it was negative.
