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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.

This article appears in Mar 7-13, 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.

8 replies on “Tony Grossi Joining WKNR After Resigning From Plain Dealer”

  1. The PD has become more whimpering and control freaked out ever since they made so many politically right judgments and thus compromised their investigative reporting. They almost seem to be run in Columbus by the Dispatch and their owners and the republican party.

    In Cleveland we have not fit into the tight little box which was able to be pulled off as the three biggest Ohio Newspapers started to cahoots too much. The center is the big money in Columbus having complete control of the media of the entire market in central and southern Ohio.

    I know Columbus very well. Lived there. Same town as the one the governor lives in. My wife, Cheryl is from Columbus and her family lives in Westerville. Nice town. Or it was anyway thirty years ago…..there I go rambling again. Sorry.

    Toni Grossi was a simple example of the social media and the total exposure of every sent word. People first were confined to e-mail and that had a small list of those who you send your cyber-space thoughts. You say something stupid and you only have a small number who need to be dealt with. With e-mail it was harder to get into trouble and much less public. Publish is to make public. Each time we put a message or a thought into digital format, it becomes eternal. And now the clouds will have all of the data and hard-drives will no longer rule the earth…but on-line every fucking thing. The whole lesson here and elsewhere is that we are going to live with what we publish…Push the send button you are made public and once you blast off, you can’t turn back.

    There is much good with this responsibility being more understood every day. But like OWS, it won’t help those who have secrets. There is a massive thearapy being conducted by the social media. It is very much a part of history and communication now, and will only become more tell-tale as time goes forward.

  2. I never thought Tony’s Browns coverage was particularly robust. Pluto wrote circles around him while covering many more sports angles. I wish Tony well but I have to question his 90% assertion just like I questioned all his articles. I do hope it works out for you Tony.

  3. “Pluto wrote circles around Grossi while covering many more sports angles” … what a laugh. Pluto has been writing circles and angles around everything, including his own column, since that dark day in the mid-90s he turned born again, became a borderline religious freak, and simultaneously destroyed all of the sportswriting skills and sportswriting talent he used to have.

    I’ll be curious how Grossi presents himself now. Will he be a pit bull, or will he be a pussycat afraid to say anything terribly negative.

  4. Republican party…plain dealer????? come on you’ve got to be kidding me. There is one writer that is conservative there, and he gets lambasted by the union mindlessness here

  5. As much as I’m not a huge Tony Grossi fan, he’s not a bad guy. He’s just another person that learned the hard way you need to keep your mouth closed on “The Twitter” as TG likes to call it. Good luck in your new position.

    Secondly, the PD is suddenly run by the Republicans? Really? What are you smoking?

  6. Pluto? Better than Tony. Keep that religious baloney to yourself Pluto. Grossi is a true sports writer. Rather be at the golf course on Sunday than listen to the rhetoric that flows from the pulpit. And, by the way, the PD is a right wing paper duh!!!

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