Signal Ohio
Susan Zake, an esteemed journalism professor at Kent State University for the past 17 years, will spearhead Signal Ohio's second newsroom.
Susan Zake, who brings a combined 37 years of experience at the Akron Beacon Journal and as a professor at Kent State, will be Signal Akron's breakout executive editor.
The Akron newsroom, funded by some $6 million, will feature nine employees, seven of those being staff writers.
Zake's aiming to staff Signal Akron—and launch a publication in full—by the end of the year.
Just as Signal's freshman publication arose during a media earthquake due to COVID-19 and a general landscape of shrinking newsrooms, Zake envisions Signal Akron filling similar journalistic gaps left by the heavy layoffs at the Beacon Journal in 2019, along with the shuttering of the alt-weeklyThe Devil's Strip in October of 2021.
The way to do so, Zake feels, is to steer away from the traditional for-profit model those publications represented.
"I want to figure out, 'Does this model work and how do we make it work?'" Zake told Scene in a phone call. "How do we make it be successful and provide the news and information in communities like Akron that have lost a lot of their coverage over the years?"
Before she helped lead the Kent State newsroom, as a mentor to countless future Northeast Ohio journalists, Zake spent two decades at the Beacon Journal, where she wore just about every editorial hat imaginable—from the photo department to graphics to working as head of the Beacon's metro beat.
In midst of the pandemic's news crunch, after 14 years as an academic, Zake helped formulate Kent State's NewsLab, a method of feeding students' regional story ideas to the shotcallers of local digital publications, like The Land and The Portager.
Although Zake and Signal Ohio have months before any stories reach the public, Zake is already developing a general reportorial direction. Sick of straight, talking-head reportage, Zake wants to focus on the trickle-down effects of Akron's major headlines of late—from the Jayland Walker verdict to the probable mayorship of Shammas Malik.
"I have never been a huge fan of what I always call institutional reporting," Zake said. "Which means you talk to the mayor, you talk to the police chief, you talk to elected officials. But you never really get down to the level of the real person who lives on the street corner."
She added, "That will be a big priority for our newsroom: to really know what Joe Citizen of Akron needs to know and thinks is important."
Like Cleveland's newsroom, Zake will guide an editor of Documenters, a community journalist corps tasked with covering public meetings. She's also amenable to publishing the same civic-focused explainers and political guides that Signal Cleveland creates on the regular.
Signal Akron, Zake said, will be working on staffing their newsroom by the early fall.
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