Heaton joined the Plain Dealer as a rock music writer in the 80s after having worked for the San Francisco Examiner and writing freelance for People Magazine. His father, Chuck Heaton, was a storied sportswriter at the PD for 50 years.
“Between us,” Heaton wrote last week, “that’s 80-plus years of Heaton bylines in the paper. Feels like the end of an era.”
In more ways than one.
The Minister departs during a turbulent time for the daily. Last week, editor George Rodrigue announced that the PD would move forward with a plan to centralize production at an as-yet-unknown facility or facilities operated by Advance Local, the paper’s corporate parent.
Nearly half of the PD’s unionized workforce will be axed in early 2019 as part of that transition. Some of the copy editors, page designers and headline writers who are slated to lose their jobs will be invited, per Rodrigue, to apply for new, non-union, Cleveland-based positions editing copy. (These position would be part of Advance Local’s national “Print Lab,” Rodrigue said, a group working at multiple locations nationwide that produces 19 print newspapers.
Heaton’s departure further depletes an editorial staff that has been strategically shrunk for the past decade. In addition to his culture columns, Heaton was among the movie reviewers at the paper, who have been covering film by committee since the departure of critic Clint O’Connor in 2015. (While Cleveland.com writes about movies quite a bit, criticism has remained under the editorial umbrella of the Guild.)
Among Heaton’s 2018 favorites: Bohemian Rhapsody, Widows, Thoroughbreds and VICE.
Heaton said that he would likely continue to write about popular culture, possibly on a new personal blog, and conveyed his gratitude to readers and past editors.
“Spending Fridays together for all these years has meant the world to me,” he wrote. “The pleasure has been all mine.”
*Correction: An earlier version of this story speculated that Plain Dealer Pub Hub staffers who will lose their jobs would be invited to apply for jobs “on the Cleveland.com payroll.” That is incorrect. The jobs would be with Advance Local’s Print Lab.
This article appears in Jan 2-8, 2019.
I never enjoyed his Minister of Culture stuff but I really liked his reviews of concerts and films…this paragraph from the linked piece is a good example for me:
‘Sorry to Bother You’
Directed by Boots Riley: I didnt like this movie. But I found it so mind-bendingly crazy I had to mention it. This movie is a futuristic, sci-fi social satire that goes so far off the rails as to be in league of its own. I guess I admire the over-the-top insanity. When the final credits rolled I felt like Sorry. . . had rearranged the molecules my brain. No other movie has made me feel that way, good or bad. I double dog dare you to see it. So freaky. – Michael Heaton
Never regained any respect for this nepotism product, after he literally cut and paste a review from the New York Times.
About three weeks after the times published it, it was his column. A disgrace to his fine dad.
Stopped reading his lame and trite and repetitive stuff a long, long time ago, despite the occasional jewels in the barrel of horsecrap. So there won’t be all that much to miss. Back in the day…like maybe in the Nineties…his columns were very good…but that happened less and less often over the years, and soon they were all duds. If he hadn’t been a legacy, he’d have been told to hang it up long before 2018.