If you, like us here at Scene, follow Cleveland.com’s social media feeds in search of local news and reporting and have, like us, found yourself flummoxed this year as their Twitter account largely stopped posting Cleveland.com articles and instead devolved into a useless dumping ground of stories from The Dodo, twice-daily pictures of the Cleveland skyline with insightful text like, “Isn’t this photo amazing!! [rainbow emoji] [sun emoji] [heart eyes emoji],” and ghoulishly offensive and ignorant questions, all posted in a voice more at home in a chain-email than in a major media outlet, and all posted in the hopes of meeting some arbitrary and dumb quotient for AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT, then we might have something you’ll be interested in.

Give a follow to @ClevelandBotCom, a Twitter account we created that will only tweet links to what Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer publish every day, based on the site’s RSS feed.

In a perfect world, we’d be smarter and we’d build a script that would only tweet stories from certain authors, but such is life. So yes, you’ll still see all the hottest Walking Dead garbage and Best Cheddar Mashed Potato Contest summaries, but at least you’ll also get the freshest local news on crime, courts, education, culture, politics, the statehouse and City Hall instead of a call out to say nasty shit to a professional athlete who happened to not have a very good Sunday kicking a football.

As a bonus, you’ll forever get to bypass their recently redesigned homepage, which is pure digital diarrhea. 

This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2018.

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

One reply on “We Made a New Twitter Account So You Can Actually Follow What Cleveland.com Publishes Every Day”

  1. I saw this article and thought “oh good, that account will cut through the BS and I can see the news being published”. Holy crap, that account is more depressing. Here are the breaking news article topics at the top of the feed.

    OSU Football
    Browns
    OSU Football
    Indians
    Big 10 Football
    Cavs
    “Today In History” (are you serious with this?)
    Indians
    AP crime report out of Indiana – Hey, at least it’s news I guess
    Weather
    Indians
    Ohio Lottery

    Holy Shit! There isn’t any journalism with 1000 miles of this publication. I’d love to see this bot remove all the AP stories and just show storied locally written. Why do I feel like that would be a 3-tweet-a-week account?

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