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| Lazy media reporters keep doing it
Letter from the Editor Yet another national media outlet has opined on the distressing state of local journalism in America by falsely portraying Cleveland as some kind of news desert, tossing our newsroom up as evidence of the media’s decline.
We’ve seen Poynter do it. We’ve seen the Washington Post do it a couple of times. The latest is from The New Yorker. The pieces are largely riddled with errors, which we point out to compel corrections, but the writers ignore the evidence we provide that their premise is entirely flawed. The New Yorker piece, in misreporting the number of journalists in our newsroom, went so far as to put quotation marks around the words “journalists and content reporters,” as if questioning whether they are either.
In our newsroom, we’re fed up with this kind of lazy, irresponsible reporting.
Cleveland is anything but a news desert.
We have four major television stations in town affiliated with national networks, all with robust news operations. They have different personalities and cover news differently, and they have teams of reporters bringing you current events.
We have a major public broadcasting entity in Ideastream. It covers the news and provides daily public affairs discussions of that news, hosting countless newsmakers and experts to enrich the Greater Cleveland audience.
We have a vigorous alternative press in the Scene. We have commercial radio stations reporting news. We have the Cleveland Jewish News, the Cleveland Observer, two thriving business publications in Crain’s and the Cleveland Business Journal and a bunch of non-profit specialty publications. Soon we will have two new non-profit newsrooms.
And, we have the newsroom for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, the most influential and robust in the state, reaching people one our website, in the print edition and its digital replica, the Sun weekly newspapers, on social media, on Youtube and in a rich array of podcasts.
Our Statehouse team has a reputation for fierce watchdog reporting, on gerrymandering, the corrupt House Bill 6 and other topics. Our Cuyahoga County reporter recently brought to light troubling tax issues with a candidate for the county executive, causing him to drop out of the race. Our reporting on the jail led to the criminal investigation of the former jail director, who ultimately was convicted and sent to jail himself.
Our sports team has redefined what it means to cover sports with its rich analyses of the Browns, Buckeyes, Cavs and Guardians. Their innovation in podcasting has provided Northeast Ohio with some of the most popular local sports podcasts in the country. The audience for our sports content is huge and loyal.
Our entertainment team covers music in the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with perspective you can’t find anywhere else, brings you news continuously on developments in the restaurant and bar industry and helps you plan your leisure hours.
All this information hasn't penetrated the national reporters' preconceived premise, which they came up with a decade ago when Advance Local newsrooms reduced home delivery and refocused newsrooms on building a digital audience. Some national media reporters said the moves doomed us, and they have continued to peddle that nonsense without actually examining what is happening.
Consider this: I’m in my ninth year of leading the cleveland.com newsroom, and not once has one of these national media reporters called me before using Cleveland as ground zero for their stories about the death of local news. Think about that. The New Yorker did not bother to do the most basic element of reporting – picking up the phone to make a call – before smearing us.
If they had, they would have learned that 2022 appears to be the year that we’ve been aiming for the past decade, the year where our journalism becomes sustainable. We won’t know until the year closes, but chances are quite strong that the revenue we earn solely based on the content we create will, for the first time, fully pay for the costs of producing it.
With close collaboration and support of the owners of our company and the executive team they have assembled, we have experimented non-stop to make sure journalism survives and thrives in Cleveland. We have a company president in Brad Harmon who is expert on building revenue to support journalism. If we create a product that has value, we have always believed, people will pay for it.
So, the next time you come across a story portraying Cleveland as the epicenter of journalism’s decline, check to see if the reporter bothered to talk to us, and then ask yourself this question: Is journalism on the wane in Cleveland, or is it deteriorating in the hands of so-called journalists who purport to cover our industry?
Thanks for reading.
Chris Quinn Editor and Vice President of Content
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