At points this year, the paper will devote ink to the city’s “rich sports history, share stories of founding innovation and industry and take a look at the leaders who shaped this city.”
Despite major changes in the newsroom in the past several years — kicked off inauspiciously with major layoffs, a reduction in home delivery days and a focus on the non-union digital operations — the Plain Dealer remains the brand to which the Northeast Ohio Media Group, Advance Ohio, Cleveland.com and all other mutations have been subservient.
Edited, these days, by George Rodrigue, the paper has produced important, impactful reporting in 2016 on critical issues in health, education, real estate, transportation and even local entertainment. (Sports, crime and politics are now the exclusive provinces of Cleveland.com.)
Cleveland.com is housed at the old Plain Dealer HQ on Superior and E. 18th, while the PD staff works in the Skylight Office Tower at Tower City. That physical division has exacerbated a certain media schizophrenia in town, one that employees at both publications, to say nothing of consumers, find occasionally frustrating and confusing.
But the value of the daily newspaper cannot be overstressed, and we look forward to celebrating the Plain Dealer’s rich traditions, as well as its current staff of skilled and dogged reporters even as we poke, pry, disagree and continue to make non-stop sport of the guileless nincompoop Ted Diadiun.
If you have issues with the paper’s coverage, as it’s no secret we often do, the best thing you can do is subscribe: Engage with the reporters and editors directly — they turn out to be very responsive via email — and be sincere about how you think they can improve.
Happy 175th, PD.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2017.
“Engage with the reporters and editors directly they turn out to be very responsive via email”
I have written several people at the Plain Dealer over the past decade. I received one response, from Kevin O’Brien, which took the form of sneering mockery. (I was new to this area at the time, and had not yet realized that I should have expected nothing else from him.)
No one else has ever responded to me.
I don’t deluge people, or nag them; I don’t blast them or call names or use profane language. Many people have told me, for what it’s worth, that I am both an articulate writer and a notably civil voice amid otherwise angry dialogues.
Perhaps I commit some other faux pas, but if the unwritten requirements for a response from the PD are that finicky, I submit that your own experience of responsiveness may not merit generalization.
Which is too bad. (Perhaps you can write a how-to.) For the time being, I have made a resolution to provide some financial support for journalism, this year. But I cannot even consider making the PD a recipient of that support, without much more persuasive evidence that someone there is truly interested in public views on how they can improve.
There is no value in irrelevance — whether it is online, bagged and thrown onto driveways, found in the few vending machines or stacked inside stores.