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By: Rebecca Theim

When former journalists and alumni of the New Orleans Times-Picayune heard the news about the imminent changes at The Plain Dealer, our hearts broke for Cleveland.

Both newspapers are owned by New York-based Advanced Publications, a chain of nearly three dozen dailies and weeklies stretching from Portland’s Oregonian to Staten Island, New York’s Advance. (Advance and its sister company, Condé Nast — publisher of The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other high-profile magazines — are owned by the billionaire Newhouse family.) For decades, Advance newspapers have been among the most stable in the United States, with a hands-off management philosophy that generally allowed local publishers to run papers as they saw fit and a formal and highly unusual job security pledge that helped to retain employees by promising never to render them jobless.

As we all now know, that began to change in 2009, initially at Advance’s eight smallish papers in Michigan. The company slashed staff there, reduced editions from daily to two-to-four a week, and sought to drive readers to its universally derided websites.

This article appears in Dec 5-11, 2012.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

4 replies on “8 Things Cleveland Can Expect from The Plain Dealer’s “Press-Ageddon””

  1. What it appears is not what it is. Things take a long time to change and die. The death of the newspaper industry as it had become years ago was seen and adapted to by the bottom line management style which nearly all business had crossed over to. The lawyers and the fancy bean-counters took over giant chunks of ownership and settled on one basic understanding: That the profit and money and liability was what business is all about. And that the customers and the workers were to be milked and exploited by all means.
    What these powerful men do not yet realize is that they too were held together by the illusions of control and power and assumptions and poor logic and shallow thought. The recent election is what will start the unravelling of the tight noose in which the far right and the super rich corporations and individuals have had upon the country and the world at large. We have given these types everything and they gave little back. Taxes and breaks to create jobs were used to create more ‘for me’ money and the political and economic power that vast accumulations of asset allow their owners.

  2. The good investigative reporting became a liability to the owners of the main stream media and they became far more likely to censor and edit any ideas that may be offensive to the big money guys and their giant corporations and money agreements. Greed became politically correct and worshipped by way too many people in the USA. We must realize that when the mentality of Donald Trump or Mitt Romney rules the GOP and would in fact vote this type into the presidency, that we have become insane and laughable to the world.
    These bad idea types are losing control by the second. They range now from being totally desperate to hold to their idol they have made of themselves and their partners who see we-the-people as the enemy to their accumulation plans, to down-right irate and in seek of revenge for having their superiority questioned and even laughed at. At another time or in another country the 1% would be having people knocked off in mass quatities and call them rebels against the state.

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